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Comment by Sean-Der | Hacker News Reader

I hope everyone enjoys WebRTC for the Curious (I am one of the authors). If you have any ideas on how to make it better I would love to hear :)

WebRTC is absolutely magical. Having 'Web' in the name does it a disservice. I see it used to.

* Remotely control excavators

* Security Cameras

* Connect autonomous robots in factories

* Low latency streaming from sail boats and rocket ships

* And all the use cases you expect (Conferencing, Telehealth etc..)

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My experience is WebRTC has an on-ramp problem, which this is partly to address, but it is significantly helped if you are thrown in the deep end to work on it with someone that knows the quirks already. The big thing I got from that process was to stop being afraid of reading the SDP, because a huge amount of the problems you will run into are really the result of SDP oddities. It is credit to people like the libwebrtc maintainers that the complex morass of MediaStreamTrack processing is as solid and performant as it is these days. (And extendable).

I share the view that it should form the basis of real time communication, humans involved or not, and a/v media involved or not. There seems to be some progress on applying absolute timestamps to frames, for example, however, at some point if we want to have rocket ships using it (and I do too) we will eventually need to have some way to reconcile divergent clocks used at different sources!

Sean is modestly not mentioning Pion here, which is the lower level library many golang people reach to for webrtc components, and deservedly so.

I need to finish it but 'Reading the SDP' I hope to solve with https://pe.pion.ly/ (https://github.com/pion/explainer). You can just your Offer/Answer in and interactively explore what has been configured.

WebRTC's complexity can be frustrating. I believe it is inherent to how many things it is trying to solve. If an alternative arrives that solves everything WebRTC does, it will end up being just as complex.

Or maybe not! Time will tell.

For JavaScript developers "simple-peer" npm package is very popular and makes WebRTC very simple. I don't think its' an on-ramp problem, holding it back, it's just that most apps don't necessarily benefit from P2P coms, and also I'd hazard a guess not many people know about WebRTC, yet. Just guessing.

In the c++ world I definitely felt the on ramp. Not surprised it is easier in js and go

I was a C++ dev all thru the 1990s, but moved to Java, JS, Python. There's really no good argument for using C++ nowadays in 99.999% of apps. Unless you're doing something VERY special like realtime stuff, or something where each action of the CPU needs to be controlled directly, you just don't need it. I'm sure you know that, tho. Not preaching at you. I learned Python as recently as 2023, just so I could get deep into the AI landscape and access all those libraries/tools.

In JS it's amazingly easier because of how you can just await on peerconnection calls, which makes developing the happy path version of the code much faster, that can then be progressively extended with proper error handling.

My experience of it in Java/C++/Golang is in every case you have to deal with all the problems far more upfront before any of it works at all. And JS doesn't have the multithreaded aspect to handle, which is also the major weakness as it eliminates the extensability in that environment.

I have a sort of proof of concept level SFU in golang, with a simple TypeScript/React client, and the whole client is this: https://github.com/atomirex/umbrella/blob/master/frontend/sr... and most of the complexity there is because I can never remember if track ID or transceiver MID should be used in different situations!

That's some pretty impressive multimedia stuff you've got there! All I know how to do is a basic P2P chat room...and the most advanced thing about it is file attachments!

Thanks, but in truth the media stuff here isn't the difficult bit as the state of webrtc in 2025 means it's really just a question of shuffling byte buffers around in time. It's really libwebrtc and the browser integrators that deserve the credit.

I have done native mobile libwebrtc work, and that's several other levels of complexity from all this, but with that you can do things like hardware accelerated neural net integration quite easily because of how it's all structured.

I'm new to this and Claude AI talked me into using 'simple-peer' as my library (NPM package) even though the browser's native WebRTC API was almost identical code. I'd be interested in your opinion about what API to use for just a chat app, that does file-sharing. In other words it will be sending around byte buffers (files) as part of the JSON objects. I haven't looked up libwebrtc yet. My WebRTC started as a "Vibe Coding" session last week, and since the results were so impressive I kept on developing it into a full-blow chat app, just for kicks.

So, I am not familiar with "simple-peer" but there are some definite inter-browser quirks relating to datachannels which it might be taking care of.

I seem to recall one browser always prefixes the buffers with sequence numbers, for example. Really fun stuff like that, but I would hope that is history by now.

My preference would be to use the standard webrtc api, and then use a polyfill style library for uniform behaviour if you don't want to worry about it (which it sounds like simple-peer might be).

In the event you want a much higher level API and pre-rolled signalling server etc. my go to recommendation on that would be https://livekit.io/ which I am not affiliated with, but I tend to think people starting out should try that and then be able to explain why they're not using it, much in the same way I would expect a game dev to try using Unreal and have a good reason if they aren't planning on using it.

Right, thanks. Appreciate the advise. I'm a big fan of using whatever libraries there available, in all contexts, as long as I'm using the "dominant" one. I always stick to whatever's most popular because it will be well supported, less buggy, have easily findable documents and resources the web, be "known about" thoroughly by LLMs, etc.

WebRTC is amazing! I think it might be helpful for some younger folks if you talked about UDP, I realize it's maybe a bit "weird" - however coming from the UDP world helped me think about all the ways WebRTC can be used. I think it's one of the most underrated and underutilized technologies.

I cannot thank you enough for writing this; the very first page with the "What, Why and How" is precisely what I wish were written for every "thing" I have ever worked with. It's so clear, and contextualizes so much so quickly, I'm frankly in awe. Thank you for your contributions!

Of course!

I think the 'What, Why and How' captures the purpose and joy of learning. Nothing is better then getting lost in a fun problem. I don't want to just understand how it is solved, but the story about how it got solved.

If you have any feedback on how the book could be better would love to hear!

Thanks so much for the book! Its lovely

Of course! Glad you enjoyed it. If you have any feedback on how to make it better I would love to hear :)

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