Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by IgorPartola 257 days ago
Negligible to none as of now. But take a look at this comment below: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45528837

And I agree: it stifled what could have been a much nicer to work with set of protocols and who knows what could have been created had we not just said "well there is always UDP if you want to do your own thing".
1 comments
tptacek 257 days ago
Stifled how? You want SCTP? Allocate a UDP port for it. You still haven't explained what the problem is.
link
IgorPartola 256 days ago
OK let’s put it this way: what is the point of IP being able to carry protocols other than ICMP, TCP, and UDP? For that matter why doN’t TCP and ICMP run on top of UDP?
link
tptacek 256 days ago
There isn't one! TCP running on top of UDP would have been a reasonable design. TCP/IP is full of warts like this. The URG pointer. The conflicting length fields.

The fact of ICMP not being itself a UDP protocol caused major problems for systems programmers, because it meant that OS kernels all "owned" ICMP, provided only a baroque sockopt programming interface to like 5% if it, and required userland programs to hold suser privileges to do any real ICMP work. Awful design. And ICMP is slow-pathed by routers, because it isn't UDP.

UDP literally doesn't do anything but multiplex raw IP. Unless you're actually worried about the 8 bytes the header takes up, there's no reason, none at all, to slide a new IP protocol anywhere but on top of UDP. Again: that's why UDP was designed in the first place. You can go look this up! David Reed still talks about it!

link
mdhb 256 days ago
Isn’t WebTransport more or less TCP (reimagined I guess but it’s key functionality and set of capabilities) running on UDP while also able to play well with the web’s security model.
link