C binding interfaces for TCP/IP

[Greg Bond]

In article <610 at cresswell.quintus.UUCP>, ok at quintus.UUCP (Richard A. O'Keefe) writes:
> In article <7202 at brl-smoke.ARPA>, gwyn at brl-smoke.ARPA (Doug Gwyn ) writes:
> > 	[talks about Sun XDR protocol]
> > it up in the Sun reference manual and found that it had FAR too much
> > overhead for my purposes.  I ended up implementing my own scheme that
> > runs much faster.
> 
> How can a program run much faster than a PROTOCOL?
> The protocol is one thing, the source-code implementation of it that
> SUN give away is quite another.

Correct. If the PROTOCOL requires significant overhead of bytes on the wire,
then the IMPLEMENTATION will be limited in the speed it can achieve, no matter 
how good the code implementing it is.

We may say that "standards" are more important than efficiency. In this
case, Doug seems to have made the judgement that the application
required an efficiency un-obtainable with XDR spec, and invented his
own, and assumed the support responsibility etc.

Yes, the protocol is not the implementation. But great implementation may
not save a poor or inappropriate protocol.

[ I make this as a general point; I have no knowledge of XDR per se ]
-- 
#define WHOAMI   Gregory Bond,  Vertical Software, Melbourne, Australia
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