Multiplayer Doom on Cloudflare Workers
There are halls and corridors in Cloudflare engineering, dangerous places for innocent wanderers, filled with wild project ideas, experiments that we should do, and extremely convincing proponents. A couple of months ago, John Graham-Cumming, our CTO, bumped into me in one of those places and asked: "What if we ported Doom multiplayer to work with our edge network?". He fatally nerd-sniped me.
Aside by John: I nerd-sniped him because I wanted to show how Cloudflare Workers and Durable Objects are a new architectural paradigm where, rather than choosing between two places to write code (the client, the browser or app, and the server, perhaps in a cloud provider availability zone), there’s a third way: put code on the edge.
Writing code that runs on a client (such as JavaScript that runs in a browser or a native app on a phone) has advantages. Because the code runs close to the end-user it can be highly interactive, there’s almost no latency since it’s literally running on the device. But client-side code has security problems: it’s literally in the hands of the end-user and thus can be reverse engineered or modified. And client-side code can be slow to update as it Continue reading
