MIO is a transport-agnostic universal stream multiplexing protocol that can be used for NAT traversal, or RPC where streams need to be multiplexed over a single connection.
- Can be used over any
io.ReadWriteCloserinterface. - Streams are multiplexed over a single connection.
- Stream-specific flow control using siding windows.
- Streams can be opened from either side (hence NAT traversal).
- Customizable protocol parameters.
I need a stream multiplexing protocol over TCP for my microservice framework (coming soon). I've tried to use HTTP/2 at first but found it impossible to get myself coding at its stream layer, either because of the lack of APIs like how golang.org/x/net/http2 is or of a too heavy dependency like gRPC. What I need is just a tiny library that focus on the stream multiplexing thing with a simple fast stream-specific flow control mechanism and can be used as equivalent APIs with the QUIC protocol hence eventually making the transport layer of my microservice framework pluggable using Go interfaces.
MIO over TCP is like QUIC over UDP :) Given this, it is possible for applications to switch their transport implementation to the one that fits the network environment they are at.
The specification is placed in the source code, check out frame.go :)
Although this library can be used for any io.ReadWriteCloser interface, it is designed to mainly be used over TCP. Therefore, MIO uses only a per-stream sliding window to implement simple flow control, the frame order and other mechanisms making the stream reliable are guaranteed by downstream protocols like TCP behind the scene, and leaving things like data compression or timeout control to upstream protocols.
When using TCP, since all MIO streams share one single TCP connection and due to the head-of-line blocking problem, it is recommended to use MIO only if your application has a large number of small-payload streams like RPC or a tunnel for NAT traversal. Otherwise, MIO works bad af :)
Issue or PR me when you find some.
- RFC 7540 - Hypertext Transfer Protocol Version 2
- RFC 6455 - The WebSocket Protocol
- RFC 9293 - Transmission Control Protocol
- inconshreveable/muxado
- rancher/remotedialer
MIO is MIT licensed.