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Comment by vore | Hacker News Reader

I think re UDP the point regarding it being unreliable is that you have to design your applications to take the unreliability into account, because it does happen even if it may be infrequent: assuming that it is reliable when you can get unreliable behavior will result in correctness issues.

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At which point most applications end up reinventing a good chunk of TCP.

I see UDP more like a low level interface allowing you to build your own on top. Where you decide what packages need to be revived 100% and which one can be dropped. Basically the foundation of your very own TCP with hookers and blackjack.

The new digital television broadcasting system in the US (ATSC 3.0) is exactly this. It's all UDP, but wrapped in another layer which allows multiple virtual streams, and that's all encoded in a CDMA wireless protocol. It's bundled up at the broadcast center, sent out via the big towers, and then unwrapped and decoded on the receiver. The end result is that once the receiver chipset has stripped off the wrapper, the OS of whatever client device is consuming the broadcast just gets regular looking UDP packets filled with MPEG-TS or DASH media streams, plus web pages, ads, games, or whatever. A.k.a. blackjack and hookers. Think of it as a giant one-way WiFi network using just UDP for the packets. It's honestly pretty cool.

> Basically the foundation of your very own TCP with hookers and blackjack.

That’s exactly how the early drafts of the QUIC RFC described it /s

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