[Bloat] Seen in passing: mention of Valve's networking scheme and RFC 5348

[Jonathan Morton]

> On 3 Apr, 2018, at 2:54 pm, Jesper Louis Andersen <jesper.louis.andersen at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> Apart from that, it seems like a lot of things are being done correctly. I *much* prefer a message-based protocol where packets use protobufs in many scenarios over a stream-oriented protocol. The former forces people to program around having limited buffers and this usually puts a flow control scheme into their programs, whereas a badly written stream transmission just creates trouble; some of those being in the security area.

I'm reminded of the original taxonomy where "reliable stream" (TCP) and "unreliable datagram" (UDP) were only two possibilities in a much wider kingdom.  The absence of "reliable datagram" in the Internet protocol suite always struck me as odd, though "unreliable stream" seemed like a contradiction in terms once you got into packet switching networks (VoIP notwithstanding).  In the end, people have kept reinventing "reliable datagram" protocols on top of UDP, whenever they ran up against requirements that TCP didn't fulfil.

 - Jonathan Morton