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Comment by ksec | Hacker News Reader

I wonder if there are any work on making something similar ( conceptually ) to TCP, super / sub set of TCP while offering 50-80% benefits of HOMA.

I guess I am old. Everytime I see new tech that wants to be hyped, completely throw out everything that is widely supported and working for 80-90% of uses cases, not battle tested and may be conceptually complex I will simply pass.

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If you have a sufficiently stable network and/or known failure cases, you can already tune TCP quite a bit with nodelay, large congestion windows etc.. There's also QUIC, which basically is a modern implementation of TCP on top of UDP (with some trade-offs chosen with HTTP in mind). Once you stray too far, you'll loose the ability to use off-the-shelve hardware, though, at which point you'll quickly hit the point of diminishing returns - especially when simply upgrading the speed of the network hardware is usually a cheap alternative.

QUIC feels very pragmatic in terms of being built on UDP. As a lay person I don’t have a sense what additional gains might be on the table if the UDP layer were also up for reconsideration.

UDP has very low cost, the header is pretty much source and dest ports. For this low, low price, you get compatibility with existing routing, firewalling, NAT, etc.

One issue with QUIC in e.g. C is how heavyweight it feels to use compared to garden-variety BSD sockets (and that’s already not the most ergonomic of APIs). I haven’t encountered a QUIC library that didn’t feel like it would absolutely dominate a simple application in both code size and API-design pressure. Of course, for large applications that’s less relevant, but the result is that switching to QUIC gets perceived as a Big Deal, a step for when you’re doing Serious Stuff. That’s not ideal.

I’d love to just play with QUIC a bit because it’s pretty neat, but I always get distracted by this problem and end up reading the RFCs, which so far I haven’t had the patience to get through.

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