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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 co

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.

fidotron 1y ago
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/ 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.
- quantadev 1y ago
  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.

fidotron 1y ago

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/ 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.

quantadev 1y ago
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.