Show HN: Port Zero – how I learned to stop worrying and love PORT=0

1 min read

Hi HN,

Recently I wasted several hours wrangling my dev environment only to find out that the browser frontend was talking to the wrong version of the backend. This got me thinking--why on earth are we still using simple numbers to describe which process to connect to? Why not use names instead? I thought of all the times a program wouldn't start because of port conflicts. The more I thought about it, the crazier it seemed.

Modern operating systems already offer no-conflict