tinynet

why build it

multiplayer games can’t wait for tcp to retransmit a lost packet. tinynet is a networking stack built directly on non-blocking udp, to understand from the ground up how reliability and ordering are layered on an unreliable transport.

foundations

a custom socket abstraction wraps posix sockets, and an endian-safe binary serialization layer keeps packets consistent across machines.

reliability without tcp

every packet carries a 16-byte protocol header. sequencing and selective acknowledgement use remote acks and a 32-bit ack bitfield, so one packet can acknowledge the 32 before it. fixed-size ring buffers track packets in constant time.

connection lifecycle

on top of that sit protocol validation, rtt smoothing, packet-loss detection, and timeout-driven connection management.

testing

unit tests cover serialization, and client–server integration tests cover transport behaviour.