BAbabuskov·Jun 7, 2026Submission
Major P2P issues in Israel and possibly other Middle East countries
283 points · Open discussionValveSoftware
GameNetworkingSockets
C++2018–2026
ValveSoftware / GameNetworkingSockets
GameNetworkingSockets
Reliable & unreliable messages over UDP. Robust message fragmentation & reassembly. P2P networking / NAT traversal. Encryption.
10Distinct people
11Mentions
0Explicit recommenders
10.1KGitHub stars
What to know before exploring
What it is
Reliable & unreliable messages over UDP. Robust message fragmentation & reassembly. P2P networking / NAT traversal. Encryption.
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.
No classified warning is attached to this page. Read the discussions before treating silence as approval.
Also in these discussions
No other repository is repeatedly linked in the same discussions.
This week on Hacker News
Nov 7–Nov 14 UTC · Direct repository links and separately labeled related project stories. Indexed through 11/14/2026, 3:03:16 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 year11 dated mentions
Observed mentions: 2018-03-28 05:41:49 UTC to 2026-06-07 03:21:52 UTC.
* An incomplete calendar period is marked with an outlined bar. Its count is not directly comparable with a full period.
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 | 3 | 2 | 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 | 3 | 1 | 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 | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| 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 | 0 | 1 |
| 2025 | 2025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2026-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| 2026 (partial) | 2026-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2027-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 3 | 1 | 2 |
What Hacker News says
11 sourcesThey didn't explain those in detail because they didn't implement these concepts themselves. The GameNetworkingSockets library (and most likely also the internal network backend that was mentioned) provides them:
> A reliability layer significantly more sophisticated than a basic TCP-style sliding window. It is based on the "ack vector" model from DCCP (RFC 4340, section 11.4) and Google QUIC and discussed in the context of games by Glenn Fiedler. The basic idea is for the receiver to efficiently communicate to the sender the status of every packet number (whether or not a packet was received with that number). By remembering which segments were sent in each packet, the sender can deduce which segments need to be retransmitted.
https://github.com/ValveSoftware/GameNetworkingSockets
In The unlikely story of Teardown MultiplayerYea UDP is technically more performant, but then you need a crypto layer + reliable message delivery layer + bespoke client. Using a plain old SSH client is cool.
However, there are existing libraries for exactly this use case - see https://github.com/ValveSoftware/GameNetworkingSockets
I guess QUIC libraries would also work.
In Why does SSH send 100 packets per keystroke?GameNetworkingSockets from Valve. Maybe not middleware enough? You have to implement the serialization and a state update strategy yourself.
Reliable & unreliable messages over UDP. Robust message fragmentation & reassembly. P2P networking / NAT traversal. Encryption.
https://github.com/ValveSoftware/GameNetworkingSockets
In Quake 3 Source Code Review: Network Model (2012)Valve GameNetworkingSockets: Reliable and unreliable messages over UDP
3 points · Open discussionCheck out Valve's game network sockets layer, it addresses a lot of the things you're worried about
https://github.com/ValveSoftware/GameNetworkingSockets
In High-Throughput Game Message Server with Python WebSocketsGameNetworkingSockets – Reliable and unreliable messages over UDP
2 points · Open discussionAccording to Valve, they deployed https://github.com/ValveSoftware/GameNetworkingSockets successfully on CS:GO.
In Play Counter-Strike 1.6 in your browserThey also open sourced GameNetworkingSockets and made it independent of steam for allowing games that use it to be ported to other markets.
https://github.com/ValveSoftware/GameNetworkingSockets
In SteamOS, Linux, and Steam MachinesGameNetworkingSockets – Reliable and unreliable messages over UDP
157 points · Open discussionValve open source its network socket library
2 points · Open discussion