Bad taste in programming languages is something that led Nostr to use WebSockets instead of normal TCP sockets in the first place, introducing huge bloatware layers on all sides.
But again, this choice also come from someone who believes there are no other version control systems than Git and no other Git hostings than GitHub...
I have been scratching my head about the WebSockets too. But here we are. And it seems to work fine.
It seems to work fine... on mainstream browser engines and hipster shitcoding platforms like NodeJS. Everyone who wants to live more frugally is left out.
I have yet to read the protocol(s) in-depth, but what would stop a relay from offering an alternative transport and falling back on WebSockets?
there is nothing stopping it, it's really easy to implement, at least in #golang i could have a gRPC/protobuf version of the protocol working in a matter of a week or two
the only minor hassle is that checking signatures on events requires converting them into a special format of json array, to get the id hash, but for lazy checking you can just enforce a uniqueness invariant on the ID (bake it into the key value store) and just check the signature matches the ID and pubkey, a single time on receiving an event you might have to actually construct the canonical form and validate the hash matches the ID, technically that's it - match the hash, hash to the signature, validated, it's a shortcut but it's secure
i would love to do this task btw, i would make actual distinctive sentinels for the two types of count and auth envelopes, so they don't have to be scanned ahead as they do in json
At first I thought gRPC/protobuf is not a transport protocol. Then I see that WebSockets has data framing and messaging. Is gRPC/protobuf light weight, though? What about Cap'n Proto? Or what about plain old UDP? I already see the bulk of relays have <50% connection success, so we're not expecting reliable transport are we? I guess UDP would mean reinventing some stuff. Again, I am speculating as an aloof user.
grpc is lightweight, pretty fast, more universally supported than capn proto for other languages including javascript! and and gRPC's default transport is QUIC which is a UDP based replacement for TCP which aims at fixing "head of line" contention
if there is any candidate for an augmentation to nostr protocol it's gotta be grpc/protobuf
protobuf is the encoding, grpc is the protocol, it handles the request/response flow
