Building a BitTorrent Client from Scratch: A Weekend Project

2025-02-24

This article details a weekend project to build a BitTorrent client. It explains the BitTorrent protocol, covering peer discovery, parsing .torrent files (Bencode), communicating with trackers, handshaking with peers, and downloading file pieces. The author uses Go and provides key code snippets, including a Bencode parser, tracker request builder, message parser, and concurrent download management. Technical details like bitfields, block requests, and pipelining are discussed, highlighting concurrency and state management. While some code is omitted, the article provides a clear roadmap for building a BitTorrent client.

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