Protocol Wars
And why is &quot;big endian vs little endian&quot; a thing in computers and networking? Because it&#x27;s homage to Jonathan Swift. It references an apocryphal war about which end of a hard-boiled egg to lop off; no doubt a much more vicious affair than the Haiti &#x2F; Dominican spat over the pronunciation of &quot;parsely&quot;.<p>Parts of the internet are still stuck in the 1980s, my pet peeve being the DNS resolution protocol which calls on recursing resolvers to try TCP after receiving a successful UDP response with TC=1. (Where did this become &quot;only&quot;? When did it become ok not to support TCP?)<p>Seems like IP works just fine on top of ATM. Maybe the MTU isn&#x27;t the same as ethernet; too bad.<p>By the way UDP frags are bad; don&#x27;t do that. Guess it&#x27;s not completely transparent afterall and relying on a kludge mechanism as the answer to knowing the terrain (MTU) isn&#x27;t the One True Way.<p>TCP is a reliability mechanism built on top of IP. It has enough popularity to have its own protocol designator so that you can&#x27;t say it&#x27;s &quot;built on top of UDP&quot;. Don&#x27;t want that mechanism? Don&#x27;t use it.<p>Want messaging? Use a datagram protocol; that would be UDP (unless you decide to use your own special protocol ID). It&#x27;s unreliable? Do something about it. (See where I&#x27;m going with this?) Craft your messages so that they fit in a single packet. Invest in some decent networking gear that reports dropped packets and allows traffic shaping. Bonus: get one-to-many and transit-based destination editing.<p>If you refuse to compromise on your abastraction and are too cheap to afford SDN, create a virtualization layer for your network traffic like everybody before you... it&#x27;s virtual turtles all the way down or hasn&#x27;t that occurred to you?