[xyzzyz]

There is little point in inventing new protocols, given how low the overhead of UDP is. That's just 8 bytes per packet, and it enables going through NAT. Why come up with a new transport layer protocol, when you can just use UDP framing?

[mlhpdx]

Agreed. Building a custom protocol seems “hard” to many folks who are doing it without any fear on top of HTTP. The wild shenanigans I’ve seen with headers, query params and JSON make me laugh a little. Everything as text is _actually_ hard.

A part of the problem with UDP is the lack of good platforms and tooling. Examples as well. I’m trying to help with that, but it’s an uphill battle for sure.

[Karrot_Kream]

I think the "problem" of sending data is a lot harder without some concept of payloads and signaling. HTTP just happens to be the way that people do that but many RPCs like zeromsg/nng, gRPC, Avro, Thrift, etc work just fine. Plenty of tech companies use those internally.

Some of this is hurt by the fact that v8, Node's runtime, has had first class JSON parsing support in but no support for binary protocol parsing. So writing Javascript to parse binary protocols is a lot slower than parsing JSON.