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It's not that SCPT is less known by developers, I think most developers actively looking for a solution to the downsides of TCP will come across SCTP. There ar
by tinco 13y ago
It's not that SCPT is less known by developers, I think most developers actively looking for a solution to the downsides of TCP will come across SCTP.
There are two real reasons, the first and most important is that Microsoft never implemented SCTP. Apparently there was not enough customer demand, but that's a lousy excuse, I'm not sure what the real reason is. Perhaps they just have no one thinking about networked applications besides the Web at the moment. Sadly lack of forward thinking is something that bugs the Windows team a lot I feel.
The second reason can be partly blamed on Microsoft as well, but most network devices operating at the transport layer have difficulty with SCTP. Why implement it when no one uses it right? just like IPv6 support. Anyway, apparently the difficulty lies with checksumming packets, which requires some more memory than is necessary for TCP/UDP.
It's a shame really. I think you can safely say that SCTP is the perfect gaming protocol. It supports almost all features gaming networking libraries usually implement on top of UDP just by configuring your streams.
- throwawaykf 13y ago> Perhaps they just have no one thinking about networked applications besides the Web at the moment. Sadly lack of forward thinking is something that bugs the Windows team a lot I feel. If you found out about the wide range of networking protocols and services they provide in Windows, you wouldn't feel that way. For example, P2P. A few years ago, while working on P2P applications, we discovered Microsoft has a lot of technologies in that area. Things like Teredo (IPv6 transition and NAT traversal) and a complete P2P networking API -- which gives you encryption, self-organizing overlays and DHTs out of the box -- have been around since around 2001, and have been built into Windows since Vista. They also had lower level protocols for things like link-layer topology discovery and automated device (printers, etc) configuration. Almost all proprietary stuff, of course - except Teredo, which has an RFC and an open source implementation - but quite interesting nonetheless. We talked to the team working on this, and they claimed it was even being used by some customers in 1000+ machine deployments. For some reason, these things are not widely marketed. Maybe because it's a niche market. However, I wouldn't say they're not forward-thinking, at least when it comes to networking.
- jimmaswell 13y agoI remember the forward-thinking present in the NT kernel being been seen in a negative light around here a while ago.
- lttlrck 13y agoOne reason is quite possibly that SCTP is not supported by most home routers/firewalls.