Comment by wongarsu | Hacker News Reader

Top New Best Ask Show Jobs

Comment by wongarsu | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

> There are no more layers to fix.

Or rather the next layers suffer too much protocol ossification to do anything about them. Replacing UDP isn't viable because too much network gear refuses to route anything but TCP and UDP. And the layer below that is upgrading at a pace comparable to our fight against climate change, with IPv6's 30th birthday coming up in two years.

Why would you want to replace UDP? It's just 8 bytes overhead. Like 0.5% of typical packet payload. With basically no guarantees or algorithms in OS to handle. As simple as possible.

While its true that there is severe ossification at those layers, changing them would have about zero impact on HTTP.

TCP isn't "ossified" it's stable.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com