What is socks5?

This is a Go library that implements the SOCKS5 protocol, a standard way for applications to route network traffic through a proxy server. If you've ever connected to a VPN or proxy to access content from a different location or hide your IP address, SOCKS5 is likely what's running under the hood. The library lets developers build SOCKS5 servers and clients in Go without reinventing the wheel. It handles the back-and-forth communication that happens when a client wants to connect through a proxy: the initial negotiation (where client and server agree on authentication), the authentication step (username and password if needed), the actual connection request, and the confirmation that everything worked. It supports both TCP (for regular web browsing and most apps) and UDP (for real-time applications like video calls or online games), and works with both IPv4 and IPv6 addresses. The library is designed to be minimal and straightforward. Instead of hiding complexity behind abstractions, it maps directly to the SOCKS5 protocol specification. So if you're reading the official SOCKS5 RFC documentation, the code structure will feel familiar. For simple use cases, you can spin up a standard SOCKS5 server with just a few lines of code and let it handle everything automatically. For more advanced cases, if you want to intercept traffic, log connections, or implement custom routing logic, you can pass in your own handler to process requests the way you want. The primary users for this library are developers building proxy tools, VPN applications, or any software that needs to route connections through a proxy server. The README mentions Brook as an example, that's a proxy application that uses this library under the hood.