The only other protocols I'm relatively familiar with are email and nntp protocols, mostly smtp and pop3. HTTP as a protocol is pretty similar at it's basic co

The only other protocols I'm relatively familiar with are email and nntp protocols, mostly smtp and pop3. HTTP as a protocol is pretty similar at it's basic constructs. Compared to HTTP/2 or newer, it's insanely simple... IMAP and FTP, those are much more convoluted and difficult to get right even on a practical level. HTTP is also pretty universal at this point with simple client and server libraries for pretty much every language or platform under the sun that could use them. You don't have to roll your own, unless you're rolling your own language, and even then, you can probably burrow an existing C implementation/library.