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Comment by 0x20cowboy | Hacker News Reader

I may have missed it, but I read the read me, looked at the main site, looked at the beginning of getting started… nowhere says what BGP stands for / is.

I get it’s written in go, but I have no idea what BGP is. Big green pages, binary grepping pipes, boisterous gambling pachyderms?

Jokes aside, y’all might want to give a brief about what this is for us uninitiated.

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BGP is pretty foundational to the internet. At some point, you have to assume hour audience knows the basics. Not everything is an intro.

Also, if you don’t know what BGP is, you aren’t going to be interested in a project implementing BGP.

It’s still wise to define acronyms before you use them to enable future Googling (links are better!). Three extra words is a small price to pay to make documentation more friendly to newcomers.

Again, at one point you have to assume either basic knowledge or at least basic knowledge about how to search for things, otherwise everything would be very verbose.

Take one of your repositories as an example: https://github.com/timraymond/pricegrabber

> A gem for interacting with the Pricegrabber API

Should you have to add "Application Programming Interface (API)" the first time you use "API" anywhere? Realistically no, because the audience can be assumed to understand what it means. If they don't, it's only a search away.

Same goes for networking and DNS/BGP/CNAME and more. If you're using a library/server for BGP, you either know what those terms are, or know how to find out more.

But not all resources are meant for beginning who don't know the basic terms in a field, and that's OK, because otherwise everything would be extremely verbose when it doesn't have to.

Of course, you can do whatever you like, but so far everyone who has thrown up such protest over this has done so by literally writing out definitions to show how hard it would be :-/

Does spelling out Border Gateway Protocol even help here?

HTML does have the <ABBR> tag. I use it all the time on my blog any time I use an acronym [1]. At least Firefox and Safari will display the title attribute as a tool tip, so hovering over the following HTML: "<abbr title="Border Gateway Protocol">BGP</abbr>" on those browsers will show "Border Gateway Protocol". I'm sad that it's not used more often.

[1] An example: http://boston.conman.org/2022/02/16.1

I just looked up BGP on DDG. The first ten hits explained it without even clicking on them.

If something isn’t clear on HN, try searching for it. If you don’t find it immediately, then you can ask without losing face.

I’ve been on the internet for quite a long time, but I’ve never heard of it before. So maybe it’s basic knowledge for a given discipline, but maybe not for others?

It’s also, I assume by the authors, submitted to hackernews which is a pretty diverse place. “Basics” is relative.

I am not saying there should be a dissertation about how the thing works, but it’s generally bad form to use abbreviations without using the long form at least once - for people who would indeed like to search for more information.

If you don’t know what BGP is you probably don’t need to know about it . It’s only really needed for configuring large networks.

> large networks

Like the Internet... way to understate it.

BGP can be used for small things too.

Many enterprises use it for their connectivity. If you are multihomed it's basically essential.

Even if you are not multihomed BGP is the most robust way to handle failover between two uplinks to the same ISP. If you are not using full routes and just taking default from each ISP the requirements/load on your router(s) are almost nothing.

Another popular use case is inside private networks, especially over GRE tunnel meshes where the filtering features of BGP allow better/easier control over topology than OSPF.

I've even seen individual servers use BGP for anycasting (usually DNS servers) or http load balancing (with DSR and L4 hashing on the upstream router).

Sorry when I say large I include corporate networks where you want the sort of redundancy that IBGP can give you. I guess Large/medium would be a fair statement.

How can someone know if they're interested or not in an implementation of BGP if they don't know what it is?

I have been a professional software developer for 22 years with a 4 year CS degree from a good school, and I only ever heard of BGP for the first time last year. Most developers never need to know about BGP. People learn new stuff every day.

The point stands. Define your acronyms unless they're really really basic, like HTTP or JSON.

HTTP and JSON may count as "really really basic" to you and BGP may not, but I worked on BGP years before I ever touched HTTP or JSON so the opposite would be true for me. People from different backgrounds are familiar with different acronyms and as a result different acronyms are assumed to be known in different contexts. Don't assume your experience to be universal.

It is good form in technical writing (or any writing, really), to define your acronyms the first time they are used. For example, this would have been helpful:

"GoBGP is an open source Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) implementation..."

Writers should never assume that knowledge of an acronym is universal.

Would you post something like "go-json is an go implementation of JavaScript Object Notation"? Or "Nginx is an Hypertext Transfer Protocol Server"? Please.... It is not that hard to search for "BGP" on the web.

Maybe so, but I wrote about mixing acronyms towards the end of this post: <http://boston.conman.org/2003/11/19.2>, where IRA can stand for one of three different things. My solution: use use <abbr> (<acronym> seems to be deprecated these days).

> Most developers never need to know about BGP.

That is my point. If I have a repo for a BGP implementation, the only people who are going to use my code are going to know what BGP is. No one is going to stumble upon the repo, read about what BGP is, and then decide to use the code. Really, they wouldn’t even be ABLE to use the code… they aren’t going to have access to a router that supports BGP… if you have access to a router with BGP, you already know what BGP is.

I don’t want to sound rude, but I’m shocked that you have a 4 year CS degree and never heard of BGP. Does your degree predate widespread use of the internet? I went to a fairly average state school and both networking courses I took (one required, one elective) covered BGP (at least at a high level).

Well if they started their 22 year career right after they graduated, then they were in school from 1996-2000… BGP was very new, and likely not taught.

Nope, I’d rather HN was not cluttered up with introductory material.

Use DDG if the HN thread doesn’t immediately give you a hint.

Border Gateway Protocol (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Border_Gateway_Protocol), basically the GPS of the internet (not technically the same, but it's close enough).

Cloudflare has already a good explanation on how it works, so I'll just point everyone out to this article: https://www.cloudflare.com/learning/security/glossary/what-i...

Also, about that undefined BGP. I'm not sure if this will help explain why BGP wasn't explained, but this is from NTT OSRG (Open-source Research Group), so probably they thought that everyone knew what BGP is (since that you probably won't encounter this otherwise).

Also, they have a Rust version: https://github.com/osrg/rustybgp

BGP is the de facto routing protocol of the Internet. The basic problem that it solves is computing and distributing routes between independently operated networks. It is actually a pretty ramshackle protocol (among other things it usually uses TCP, which can create some interesting problems [1]) but it is the only widely deployed protocol that can handle the scale of the Internet.

In theory BGP can be used within a single network, though it is not well-suited to such an application except in very large networks. Facebook is known to use BGP internally [2]. Usually an "interior gateway protocol" like OSPF or IS-IS is better for internal routes, with BGP then distributing those routes to the external networks from the gateway routers (i.e. those routers that interconnect the networks). BGP can also be used for other, more niche applications within a single network, like setting up VPNs (VPLS, VPNv4, etc.).

[1] https://blog.benjojo.co.uk/post/bgp-stuck-routes-tcp-zero-wi...

[2] https://research.facebook.com/publications/running-bgp-in-da...

Border Gateway Protocol how the internet shares its routing table.

In this context, BGP stands for Border Gateway Protocol.

I opened a PR to fix that. https://github.com/osrg/gobgp/pull/2535

I am finding for a long time that what BGP is… The docs even linked Golang without linking BGP. I thought it was something about board games

That’s because the people who are interested already know, and the people who don’t know won’t be interested.

If you DDG, the top ten hits explain it without even clicking. Try that.

It's that thing facebook messed up the other day and nobody could connect to it.

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