Comment by hardwaresofton

Ahh thanks for clarifying this! Makes a ton of sense now -- I need to try writing some of these style of programs (in the high perf Rust style) to see how they feel.

> For example, we've been considering adding a QUIC stack next to the WireGuard tunnels as a control protocol in `snownet`. By using a sans-IO QUIC implementation like quinn, I can do that entirely as an implementation detail because it just slots into the existing state machine, next to ICE & WireGuard.

Have you found that this introduces a learning curve for new contributors? Being able to easily stand up another transport is pretty important, and I feel like I can whip together an async-required interface for a new protocol very easily (given I did a decent job with the required Traits and used the typestate pattern) where as sans-IO might be harder to reason about.

Thanks for pointing out quinn-proto (numerous times at this point) as well -- I'll take a look at the codebase and see what I can learn from it (as well as str0m).

[EDIT]

> The problems of function colouring only exist if you don't focus on building the right thing: an IO-free implementation of your protocol. The protocol implementation is usually the hard bit, the one that needs to be correct and well-tested.

The post, in a couple lines!

[EDIT2] Any good recommendations of a tiny protocol that might be a good walk through intro to this?

Something even simpler than Gopher or SMTP? Would be nice to have a really small thing to do a tiny project in.