On Tue, 3 Apr 2018, Michael Welzl wrote:

> Sure, when you’re in control of both ends of a connection, you can build 
> whatever you want on top of UDP - but there’s a lot of wheel 
> re-inventing there. Really, the transport layer can’t change as long as 
> applications (or their libraries) are exposed to only the services of 
> TCP and UDP, and thereby statically bound to these transport protocols.

I'm aware of TAPS and I have been trying to gather support for this kind 
of effort for years now, and I'm happy to see there is movement. I have 
also heard encouraging talk from several entities interested in actually 
doing serious work in this area, including some opensourcing part of their 
now non-FOSS code-base as part of that work.

So we need applications to be able to get more access to what's going on 
the wire, including access to non-TCP/UDP, but also to be able to create 
"pluggable TCP-stacks" so that a host can have several different ones, and 
the user can install new ones even on older operating systems.

With more and more IPv6 around, I hope we'll be able to deploy new 
protocols that are not TCP/UDP (A+P), and that this will bring back some 
innovation in that area.

-- 
Mikael Abrahamsson    email: swmike@swm.pp.se