Plan to follow

[midirhee12]

There needs to be a general plan to follow when going about such a large project. With that being said, let's agree on some foundational things to start pushing this project forward. Then we can implement the very basics like Ethernet frames, IP, UDP, and so on.

A vocabulary needs to be established for a bucket of bits that can arbitrarily be passed around between compositions of arbitrary protocols. That means we need to account for arbitrary OSI layer, CPU architecture, NIC, number of bits in a byte, etc. The operating system cannot be assumed. And embedded support is absolutely necessary.

My first suggestion is message to follow the actor model. The message could be wrapped in a header of footer to create a totally new message to be passed around.

My only qualms is that this does not work for the header or footer of any protocol or any of the sections of a header or footer. However, is it really necessary for these to be viewed the same? There could be a simple consistent pattern for packing sections into a header or footer. There could be a constructor for each of these as well. If together needed to be specified, could the term "layer" be used?

If any single part of the planning gets too big, maybe let's create a separate issue for this. I don't realistically expect all of planning for this project to happen in this one GitHub issue. And if I'm being stupid, just let me know.