[LAU] Open Sound Control: Is it still a thing?

[Fons Adriaensen]

On Wed, Apr 28, 2021 at 10:49:25AM -0400, Marc Lavallée wrote:

> "This new specification enormously expands the range of protocols and
> hardware transports that can be used to communicate OSC encoded packets
> including Firewire, Ethernet, and USB (using TCP/IP); RS232 and RS422 and
> Serial USB and Serial Bluetooth and Serial Zigbee"

The advantage of SLIP over the lenght prefix would be that it allows
a connection to resync to a packet boundary in case some bytes would
be lost. But if the transport is not reliable, OSC encoding doesn't
provide anything to mitigate that. No checksum or forward error control.
So things would fail anyway, potentially in catastrophic ways.

Another thing missing is even the most basic security, something that
can't be ignored in these days. Now if that is added, the same layer
would very probably define packet boundaries anyway. So SLIP doesn't
add anyting useful.

> for TCP could be added, but the overhead of SLIP seems to add only 4 bytes
> (32 bits): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Serial_Line_Internet_Protocol

Plus any data bytes that need to be escaped.
 
Ciao,

-- 
FA