Personally, I consider it very bad taste for you to sanctimoniously criticize Gaffer's tone to promote your own work. Sometimes a good rant is a very effective way to communicate.
I taught Computer Graphics for several years, and I came across two kinds of students: uninterested, so no matter what you do they probably won't learn; and interested and trying hard but not understanding, in which case it's my responsibility as the teacher to find a way to get the idea into their heads.
In this latter case I believe asking someone who is trying (but failing) to understand what I'm saying "What the fuck is wrong with you?" doesn't lead to better understanding on their part. Yes, I promote my own work, but this is because I feel it caters to a public that is usually left out -- the absolute beginner. The kind of people who are missing a mental leap or two to get the concepts but are either ignored or essentially called idiots for not understanding.
"Yeah... Gaffer is well-known as a guide, but also kind of horribly flawed. Question 1 for networking development: Do you need everything that TCP offers? If yes, then use TCP. You're not going to outperform TCP to do what it's good at. If not, read on."
This was a gilded +20 comment in the thread despite a) being nonsense and b) having the temerity to call his advice 'horribly flawed.' He is an expert with multiple shipped AAA games. And he prefixed his rant with RANT MODE ON. Sometimes you just need the cluestick.
I took this to be something more akin to "never implement your own crypto." If everyone followed that advice there would be no crypto, so it's obviously not blanket advice.
https://packetzoom.com/blog/lessons-learned-tcp-slow-start-d...
TCP has a lot of tunable parameters where the choices are baked into it, and it assumes that extra round trips are no big deal.
Crypto does not have all that many tradeoffs. You just need expert implementation. It's dangerous and unnecessary to do it yourself.
For something that is low-bandwidth and latency-sensitive, you can take TCP and make minor adjustments and come out with something that is far better suited. Even something as dumb and easy as sending all packets twice could turn an semi-common jitter into an ultra-rare jitter.
If you could open a TCP socket with forward error correction options, and disable head-of-line blocking, then you could probably argue against custom TCP-like protocols. But that's not the world we live in.
You don't need to know that much about networking to get something that's better than TCP in this specific use case. It may be unoptimized and terrible but your goal is latency. Just pretend that 5% of packets will get lost and do something to compensate, and you beat TCP on imperfect networks, even as a novice.
WebRTC went for UDP-encapsulated SCTP in order to get a transport without HOL blocking. I'd look into that or an existing UDP game net transport (like Enet) first.
I'm usually not bothered by insults or harsh language, so perhaps we're viewing this post through different lenses.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10212003
I think the person didn't even read the articles but smeared them anyway. Blasting such a person is entirely justified. That the rant included useful information, too, was quite generous.
http://gafferongames.com/networking-for-game-programmers/
Very first link explained some of what Reddit poster asked with others covering how to solve the problem and why each method was used. Reading that person's post shows he or she took a casual glance at Part 4, didn't attempt to read rest, drew conclusions, then smeared same article on Reddit, then pretended to know what he or she was talking about on advanced aspects, and then asked some questions. This is the kind of behavior that makes the Internet drop verbal bombs on people as punishment and to deter future instances of laziness and arrogance.
So, when seeing this, the writer has several choices: reward the behavior by rewriting their articles points in new comment for just that lazy person w/ specific references to things he or she ignored; link back to original w/ guidance on specific parts he or she ignored; blast him or her for being a lazy idiot who writes criticisms of stuff he or she doesn't even read. I think the latter is an entirely valid strategy in such a situation. It has the side benefit of preparing the person for the fact that the Internet will drop bombs on them when they display laziness, ignorance, and sense of authority at the same time. Hopefully the deterrent effect kicks in with the poster reading the next article and its links first. And only then questioning or criticizing part of it.
Less likely to get rants that way from that writer, other writers, FOSS projects, and anyone else that doesn't tolerate such bad behavior. You're much more patient than most. Nothing wrong with that either. Let's just differentiate between people making solid attempt to learn and people like this poster. Nobody's insulting the former. If they did, I'd totally agree with you. Far as this poster, I'd have grilled him or her too.
If I'm writing a chess game, I could easily just stream the text format of the games over an IRC channel. Many things, including games, don't necessarily need high bandwidth or low latency over consistency.
But the attitude is definitely not warranted.