Item — HN Reader

Wrong. TCP has a lot of behaviour you can't work around. UDP is what you write it to be. When experiencing packet loss not due to bandwidth, TCP will delay recovery compared to what UDP can achieve.

For games etc, you need to be able to hide 1-2 seconds of lag for TCP.

1 comments

I thought it was pretty clear in the post you're responding to that there are situations in which UDP is a much better choice, I even called out games specifically. The question is, do you need reliability (as defined by guaranteed delivery and sequencing) or not. If you do, UDP is not enough even if it is seems "mostly reliable" in some tests. "Mostly reliable" is not useful if you need "actually reliable".

If you need the full reliability TCP offers, UDP isn't the answer unless you layer your own protocol on top of it, and while it is possible to layer your own protocol on top of it that will beat TCP for specific use cases, most people (who aren't expert network programmers and don't even know about [let alone understand] the minefields of issues you can run into such as dealing with NATing, etc) are much better off just using TCP, warts and all.