Let’s play: python-gotalk

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A recent HackerNews post announced Gotalk, a simple bidirectional protocol.I can imagine your collective eyeballs rolling. “Oh great, yet another half-baked way for… things to talk to one other”. But keep following along, maybe you’ll see something you like. Here are some highlights:

  • By Rasmus Andersson - You may know him from his work at Facebook, Spotify, and Dropbox.
  • Bidirectional — There’s no discrimination on capabilities depending on who connected or who accepted. Both “servers” and “clients” can expose operations as well as send requests to the other side.
  • Concurrent - Not too earthshattering, but this is a non-blocking, multiplexed protocol.
  • Debuggable - ASCII-based wire format. You can, of course, encode your payloads any number of way, but you’ll have an easy time with your packet sniffers and debug tools.
  • Pretty damned simple - There’s not a whole lot to Gotalk. A handful of message types. A pretty simple, easy-to-parse wire format. Nothing crazy for terminology or concepts. If you were curious about network protocols and wanted a gentle intro, this would be a great one to look at.

The official Gotalk repo has a bunch of examples and even some helper libraries in Go and JS. The official implementation is in Go, with the JS libraries being built on top of WebSockets.

But what about Python?!?

“But Greg, I too want to play with this fledging version 0.0 protocol! And I want to do it in Python!”

You, my friend, are in luck! I have a rough, version 0.0 Python module to go with this new, version 0.0 protocol.

For now, most of the effort is on message serialization and deserialization. We’ll be keeping that separate from any of the naughty bits (sockets, IO, and other things). The goal is to provide some reusable components that people can tinker with.

And more importantly, I haven’t ever bothered to mess around at the protocol level very often. This has been a great excuse to play around with a spec that is just getting started.

Pull requests, issues, suggestions, and the whole lot are welcome. Tell me how bad I screwed up!

Closing notes

If it wasn’t already evident, do not use this for anything but tinkering right now!.

Also, to stem the tide of “Well, why didn’t you just use X instead?”, this is a fun little experiment for me. Yes, I wrote a protocol serialization/deserialization for funzies. No, I’m not mentally ill.