> So if you're ever doing this for a UART or network stream or something, always do the delimiter approach!
I'm confused. I mean for UART, sure. But network streams is usually sent over a protocol that recovers lost data. Am I reckless for sending length-prefixed data chunks over TCP?
No, you're right that this approach is ok for TCP streams. I shouldn't have thrown that in there without clarification that I meant something more generic.
I actually use SLIP for packetisation over TCP anyway, because then syncing for any other logging or diagnostic thing that joins halfway through is easy. Basically I find it to just be a more robust system.
TCP is a stream with no packet boundaries. If you want to separate that stream into a series of messages then you need to do packetisation. The SLIP delimiter approach is a pretty good one.
You're right that it was originally for segmenting a serial link to send separate IP packets (so you could theoretically have SLIP over TCP over IP over SLIP), but it works just as well in other contexts.
I'm confused. I mean for UART, sure. But network streams is usually sent over a protocol that recovers lost data. Am I reckless for sending length-prefixed data chunks over TCP?