Post by Omar Rizwan (@omar@social.omar.website)

vague complaining to friends this morning --

i feel like WebSockets just kind of suck and aren't reliable
does anyone else just have this ambient sense

like on a WebSocket, because of the API design, it's on you to basically provide a handler for anything happening -- it doesn't crash your program or give you a weird return value on your critical path when something goes wrong (as it would in traditional imperative-C-talking-to-TCP, I think)

i feel like the async nature of it makes it
harder to detect things going wrong too

compared to a traditional TCP connection
where ok your read() or write() call or your
infinite loop went off the rails

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Omar Rizwan @omar

i guess the intuitive argument for why plain HTTP works better than WebSocket is like the thing about why rebooting your computer works. HTTP requests reset the system state every time, so they usually work; WebSockets don't

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Omar Rizwan @omar

it also reminds me of the very different 'feel' of JavaScript dynamic types and, say, Python dynamic types -- Python will actually stop if you have a type error and not keep going, which makes it feel much less likely to get into weird undefined states.

the silent coercion and event-driven/concurrent APIs in Web stuff both make it really easy to only see the happy path during development, so you end up with a very shaky system

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