APapitman·Mar 28, 2024Submission
KCP – A TCP alternative optimized for latency
5 points · Open discussionskywind3000
kcp
C2018–2024
skywind3000 / kcp
kcp
:zap: KCP - A Fast and Reliable ARQ Protocol
6Distinct people
6Mentions
0Explicit recommenders
17KGitHub stars
What to know before exploring
What it is
:zap: KCP - A Fast and Reliable ARQ Protocol
GitHub
Where it is used
No documented product use has been verified yet.
What people are saying
No recommendation phrase was found in the indexed comments.
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Also in these discussions
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This week on Hacker News
Nov 7–Nov 14 UTC · Direct repository links and separately labeled related project stories. Indexed through 11/14/2026, 3:56:07 PM UTC.
No direct repository links were found in the indexed HN discussions over the past seven days. Older discussions are available below.
Mentions over time
HN mentions by year6 dated mentions
Observed mentions: 2018-02-01 02:52:38 UTC to 2024-03-28 23:20:11 UTC.
Counts come from the repository’s dated source evidence. Index cutoff: 2026-11-02 08:16:59 UTC.
View mention counts and date ranges
| Period | Start (UTC) | End (exclusive, UTC) | Mentions | Submissions | Comments |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2018 | 2018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 1 | 0 | 1 |
| 2019 | 2019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| 2020 | 2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2 | 0 | 2 |
| 2021 | 2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 1 | 1 | 0 |
| 2022 | 2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 1 | 0 | 1 |
| 2023 | 2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| 2024 | 2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 1 | 1 | 0 |
What Hacker News says
6 sourcesIn addition to QUIC, KCP [1] is another reliable low-latency protocol that sits on top of UDP that might be interesting. And unlike RFC 9000/9001 (QUIC), encryption is optional. I haven't really seen it mentioned much outside of primarily China-focused projects, like V2Ray [2], but there is also some English information in their Git repo [2].
[1]: <https://github.com/skywind3000/kcp>
[2]: <https://www.v2fly.org/en_US/>
[3]: <https://github.com/skywind3000/kcp/blob/master/README.en.md>
In We need a replacement for TCP in the datacenter [pdf]KCP: A Fast and Reliable ARQ Protocol
37 points · Open discussionYes, but this blog post does performance benchmarking against weaker libraries, while not showing the performance of stronger competitors.
https://github.com/skywind3000/kcp/blob/master/README.en.md BTW has exactly the same diagram as this blog post, so even though it mentions enet, it does not show enet's performance in its comparison graph.
Plus it only mentions enet in the case of a (almost catastrophic) network failure where even KCP has a 1+ second ping. Playing any kind of online game with a ping above 0.5s is pure pain, so that situation is not a valid data point for arguing about KCP or enet's pros or cons.
In Show HN: KCP: a new low-latency, secure network stackKCP is truly awesome. I'm using it in a cross-platform Qt project as alternative to UTP or QUICK protocols which both lack easy to embed libraries.
Check out the C library (MIT licensed) on Github:
https://github.com/skywind3000/kcp
In Show HN: KCP: a new low-latency, secure network stackI wonder how QUIC compares to KCP[0].
[0]: https://github.com/skywind3000/kcp/blob/master/README.en.md
In Measuring QUIC vs TCP on mobile and desktop