Network Programming in Elixir and Erlang

Wrapping Up

Now, you might be thinking, “Wow, all this work to implement guarantees in UDP. Isn’t there a protocol that provides them out of the box?” Well, of course there is: it’s TCP. As we mentioned when we started our UDP journey, your default choice of protocol should be TCP, unless you’re sure that UDP’s fewer guarantees are worth it for your use case.

In this chapter, you learned more about the challenges that surround UDP. We explored techniques and strategies that you can use to deal with out-of-order, dropped, or split packets. This is important knowledge to have when it comes to UDP. Depending on the use case, you might need to guarantee a subset of these things—for example, you might be okay with dropped packets, but you might require ...