C binding interfaces for TCP/IP

[Richard A. O'Keefe]

In article <7202 at brl-smoke.ARPA>, gwyn at brl-smoke.ARPA (Doug Gwyn ) writes:
> In article <2168 at cognos.UUCP> jimp at cognos.UUCP (Jim Patterson) writes:
> >In conjunction with RPC, Sun has
> >an excellent protocol called XDR (eXternal Data Representation) ...
> I wouldn't call it "excellent".  A few months back, when I needed to
> ...
> 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.
With respect to the protocol, XDR is historically related to Courier,
so there's a fair bit of experience behind the *protocol*.
It may well be a good idea to write one's own implementation of the
protocol, but it is not such a good idea to invent yet another data
conversion protocol.