> Why would you write networking code in C in 2016, when there are better alternatives available (like this one)?
As someone who's done a bit of game development in the past I can easily say that you'll fall flat on your face in some fields if you don't write your own protocols. There are simply no protocols that operate well in every use case and there are also use-cases without standardized protocols.
For extremely high performance operations you NEED to use a custom protocol in some case to squeeze every bit of power out of your applications.
From a game development perspective you need to handle two types of content: content that isn't really ordered by time occurrence and content that needs to happen sequentially.
Because of this you can correctly optimize your networking stack for those needs and get your networking system really fast.
Some people have taken to using TCP with a JSON message passing system and that just doesn't work large scale. You'll have huge latency issues and with a big enough game you have to do some serious bit-packing to make it cost effective to host servers for.
Now I'm speaking generally and this is just from my experience but there is definitely still a reason to write your own network code.
I believe pcwalton agrees that the ability to write one's own networking code is important. The quoted line is simply questioning why you'd write such code in C (which, if you're a game developer, means that "platform support" is a perfectly valid answer).
As someone who's done a bit of game development in the past I can easily say that you'll fall flat on your face in some fields if you don't write your own protocols. There are simply no protocols that operate well in every use case and there are also use-cases without standardized protocols.
For extremely high performance operations you NEED to use a custom protocol in some case to squeeze every bit of power out of your applications.
From a game development perspective you need to handle two types of content: content that isn't really ordered by time occurrence and content that needs to happen sequentially.
Because of this you can correctly optimize your networking stack for those needs and get your networking system really fast.
Some people have taken to using TCP with a JSON message passing system and that just doesn't work large scale. You'll have huge latency issues and with a big enough game you have to do some serious bit-packing to make it cost effective to host servers for.
Now I'm speaking generally and this is just from my experience but there is definitely still a reason to write your own network code.