ARArathorn·Apr 11, 2017
I'm not sure it's fair to call it a massive blob of web technologies (although I'm biased, given I work on it). To compare sending a message on IRC versus sending one on Matrix:
$ telnet irc.freenode.net 6667
...
NICK Ara4n
USER Ara4n Ara4n irc.freenode.net :Matthew Hodgson
...
JOIN #matrix
PRIVMSG #matrix :test
versus:
curl "https://matrix.org/_matrix/client/r0/rooms/!cURbafjkfsMDVwdRDQ%3Amatrix.org/send/m…" -X PUT --data '{"msgtype":"m.text","body":"test"}'
(okay, this assume you've grabbed a valid access_token from an existing session, and already know that #matrix:matrix.org's internal ID is !cURbafjkfsMDVwdRDQ:matrix.org, but that's easy to find by curling https://matrix.org/_matrix/client/r0/directory/room/%23matri...).
Meanwhile definitely are some lightweight C matrix
Read the rest
clients out there - e.g. https://github.com/matt-williams/matrix-esp8266/blob/master/... is a proof of concept client in C that runs on an ESP8266(!), or the libpurple plugin: https://github.com/matrix-org/purple-matrix.
In the end, if you don't like HTTP or web technologies, there is NOTHING stopping people from contributing alternative transports - COAP, MQTT, capnproto, QUIC, XMPP, WebSockets or whatever floats their boat. But it seems that the simple HTTP+JSON API works well enough that nobody has bothered yet (other than https://github.com/matrix-org/matrix-doc/blob/master/drafts/...).