TCP and UDP aren't competitors—they're answers to different questions. One asks 'Did you get that?' The other says 'I hope you got that.' Knowing which question your application is asking determines everything.
The transport layer solves an impossible problem: letting applications on different machines have private, reliable conversations over shared, chaotic infrastructure—without knowing anything about the chaos in between.
Connection states reveal what two machines are saying to each other—and more importantly, where the conversation broke down.
Protocols are the precise rules that let machines communicate without intuition—anticipating every possible failure because at Internet scale, everything that can go wrong does.
Your computer has one network connection but dozens of programs using the network. A socket is how each conversation stays separate—the addressing system that lets packets find the right program.
Was this page helpful?