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

The show story

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 this counts

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.

What precedes this

Modern operating systems already offer no-conflict ports: if you make your TCP server listen on port 0, the OS assigns you a random available port

Where this fits in Signal Ledger

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The lens

Modern operating systems already offer no-conflict ports: if you make your TCP server listen on port 0, the OS assigns you a random available port. Create a virtual NIC (if it hasn't already) 2.