I'm so curious about what the 30% of you who are designing custom UDP-based protocols are doing, I would love to hear more!

(please only reply if you responded “yes, UDP” to the above poll)

@b0rk things I've built with UDP:

- a lot of bespoke lighting systems based on ESP8266 modules, where I couldn't be bothered to write a proper ArtNet interface

- a system for doing reactive backlighting on large projector screens, similar to Philips Ambilight but on a full event stage scale

- a silly network buffer storage system where you "store" stuff by repeatedly forwarding packets

- some basic P2P stuff

- a few toy VoIP systems

- a few attempts at multiplayer game code along the years

@b0rk also, if it counts, I've written interfaces to other people's custom UDP protocols, both for personal reasons and at work. Pioneer Rekordbox (DJ software) has some custom UDP stuff for timecode and OSC and I tinkered with that for a bit.

I see custom UDP stuff a lot in industrial control systems where it's easier to deal with protocol-level retries and acknowledgement in exchange for stateless multicast/broadcast capability than it is to deal with stateful unicast, for various reasons.