Building my own network stack • Hacker News Board

Re: Building my own network stack

#21

Post by andai » Sun, Aug 30, 2026, 12:22 PM UTC

p-e-w wrote: post #6

N_Lens wrote: post #4

I disagree

So do I. According to today’s prevalent tech/science culture, “everyone” should - write their own network stack, compiler, text editor, operating system - learn 3-5 foreign languages - travel extensively - learn how computers work from the silicon principles to the userspace - have a complete understanding of algorithms and data structures before even attempting to build anything, because nothing else will do - read…

That's a great list actually.

Let's invert it.

Everyone should: be computer illiterate, monolingual, never leave their home town, use left-pad, be regular illiterate, sedentary, uncultured, unlanded, and... alienated from their family?

Well, I'm off to a great start!

Re: Building my own network stack

#22

Post by dakolli » Sun, Aug 30, 2026, 12:31 PM UTC

dromologist wrote: post #3

Prediction: as agentic code generation gets better, more and more code will be written JIT for it to be executed for security reasons. The engineer of the future is not only the one who uses agents to code, he uses agents to code each time "the" program is ran.

No

Re: Building my own network stack

#23

Post by _pdp_ » Sun, Aug 30, 2026, 12:39 PM UTC

Everyone should build their own ** is the general advise I would give just about anything. Otherwise it is hard to appreciate how much effort it goes into things that we take for granted.

Everything looks simple from the outset until you try to build it yourself.

Re: Building my own network stack

#24

Post by tmountain » Sun, Aug 30, 2026, 12:42 PM UTC

andai wrote: post #18

Monoculture. It's like when all bananas used to be clones of each other and a disease wiped out the whole species.

Used to be? Isn’t this still the case?

Re: Building my own network stack

#25

Post by tonyhart7 » Sun, Aug 30, 2026, 12:44 PM UTC

_pdp_ wrote: post #23

Everyone should build their own ** is the general advise I would give just about anything. Otherwise it is hard to appreciate how much effort it goes into things that we take for granted. Everything looks simple from the outset until you try to build it yourself.

if you have time, money, energy, attention to do it then yes

but unfortunately not everyone have same opprtunities

Re: Building my own network stack

#26

Post by patmorgan23 » Sun, Aug 30, 2026, 12:45 PM UTC

mihaelm wrote: post #15

daishi55 wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

why are you assuming there would be no proper verification in this scenario?

Proper verification would be deterministic rules the JIT-ed code would be checked against, so it would have to be non-JIT. Since the comment is talking about using more & more JIT for security reasons, I assumed it extended to verification too. I don't get why you'd generally switch to JIT for security reasons.

Who writes the formal verification spec and when?

Re: Building my own network stack

#27

Post by patmorgan23 » Sun, Aug 30, 2026, 12:47 PM UTC

daishi55 wrote: post #12

mihaelm wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What's there to gain security-wise? Nondeterministic generation & then execution of that code without proper verification seems to be the opposite of a good security posture.

why are you assuming there would be no proper verification in this scenario?

If you're doing formal verification, why are you JIT generating Code? Is the formal verification also being JITd? How do you know the agent wrote a good spec?

Re: Building my own network stack

#28

Post by rbanffy » Sun, Aug 30, 2026, 12:51 PM UTC

Back in the 8-bit days, we all wrote our own kernel process schedulers in order to make simple games. If you had an Apple II and wanted music, you'd need to make yours a hard real time one as well.

Re: Building my own network stack

#29

Post by daishi55 » Sun, Aug 30, 2026, 12:52 PM UTC

mihaelm wrote: post #15

daishi55 wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

why are you assuming there would be no proper verification in this scenario?

Proper verification would be deterministic rules the JIT-ed code would be checked against, so it would have to be non-JIT. Since the comment is talking about using more & more JIT for security reasons, I assumed it extended to verification too. I don't get why you'd generally switch to JIT for security reasons.

Why can’t you JIT- generate the code and then run the verification?

Re: Building my own network stack

#30

Post by _pdp_ » Sun, Aug 30, 2026, 12:53 PM UTC

tonyhart7 wrote: post #25

_pdp_ wrote: post #23

Everyone should build their own ** is the general advise I would give just about anything. Otherwise it is hard to appreciate how much effort it goes into things that we take for granted. Everything looks simple from the outset until you try to build it yourself.

if you have time, money, energy, attention to do it then yes but unfortunately not everyone have same opprtunities

My point is that it is a great way to learn and be more appreciative of what is done and why - network stacks, graphic stacks, web, etc - before being too critical of them.

Besides, statements such as "$7B for a proxy" or "it is just a wrapper" or "we can build it in-house" mostly come from those that have not had any measure of the scope due to not having any real experience with the said problem.