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Comment by qrv3w | Hacker News Reader

I initiated the croc project. Others have asked me the same thing, so I'll bite:

I chose not to copy the features of magic wormhole because it seemed to me (at the time) to be very complicated and lacking in features crucial to myself (namely restarting transfers [1], sending folders without zipping them).

This has been to my benefit, I think, because I can iterate on croc quickly without having to conform to the wormhole spec and I've since added features still not available in wormhole (like restarting transfers [1], and ipv6 support [2]).

That being said, I really like magic wormhole and consider it my inspiration. And I'm glad that you ported it to Go!

[1]: https://github.com/warner/magic-wormhole/issues/88

[2]: https://github.com/warner/magic-wormhole/issues/354

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Thank you. Croc is fantastic because it solves a problem that no other tool does. Magic Wormhole stumbles at the first hurdle (installability).

I'm sorry but I don't understand the hurdle?

As I mentioned in another thread installing Magic Wormhole is _easy_, just "brew install magic-wormhole" or "sudo apt-get install magic-wormhole" (or distro equivalent). Windows might be tricky but don't see how croc does it much better. I hadn't heard of Scoop but seems like you'd need to install _that_ first (which has its own dependencies). That said I haven't used Windows in many many years, maybe Scoop is the standard nowadays like Homebrew is for Mac? In which case I'd give a point to croc.

Also, with a Go app you could just share/distribute the binary, but then you also need to know where to put it. And you could do that with Magic Wormhole as well.

Or a step better like using something like PyInstaller (wonder why author hasn't done that?)..

As BusTrainBus says, "installability" is useful, and it was one of my motivations.

I agree installation for magic wormhole is easy for Mac/Linux, but I think its not easy on Windows. Windows is very common (77% of the market share for desktops [1]) so I wanted to keep croc easy to install for Windows.

In fact, if you are just receiving a file on Windows, all you have to do is download the binary from releases [2], unzip it, and double click on the binary - no terminal experience required. (Sending a file does require using a terminal, but all CLI apps have that hurdle...).

[1]: https://gs.statcounter.com/os-market-share/desktop/worldwide

[2]: https://github.com/schollz/croc/releases

Can you write what is that hadcoded relay in croc? Who maintains it, how does it handle the increase in demand or outages etc?

I maintain it. Its been up for about 2 years with pretty minimal downtime.

In any case, I encourage everyone to setup their own relay. Its easy. Make sure ports 9009-9014 are open and then run `croc relay`.

Connecting to your relay is as easy as `croc --relay ADDRESS:9009 send X`. And if you add the `--remember` flag you only have to tell it which relay to use once.

Would it be possible to sniff the protocol on the wire and provide some sort of cross-compatible magic wormcroc service?

Definitely possible. I'll happily take any PR that does this.

> so I'll bite

Just curious: pun intended?

I didn't see this one until now :)

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