Great interaction. Very refreshing after some of the past problems I've encountered with maintainers treating forks as hostile or "stealing our work".
The message also exposes a reality of how hard it can be to upstream internal changes: They admit they don't have the time to go back and re-submit all of their work as tiny incremental patches that could be reviewed and approved upstream. They estimate it would be on the order of 100 PRs necessary to break it up and get it reviewed. That's a very large time investment for a company that needs to keep moving forward.
Hopefully they stay close in the rest of the implementation details of the project they forked from. After a fork becomes battle-tested enough it might be reasonable to start merging things in larger chunks rather than treating them as incremental development again.
disclosure: I work on the team behind noq. Can't emphasize enough that the quinn maintainers are really lovely people, and quinn is an excellent project.
iroh seems like a very well positioned product in the era of people rapidly building applications for personal use. I'm really interested in seeing how they continue to grow.
I personally have been looking off and on at providing an "app relay" using it, where people can get an OSS, self-hostable (if desired), zero config way to remotely access their app/data on their network. This would be separate than a "network relay" (a la Tailscale), as this is done selectively as part of the application server and client, requires no knowledge or configuration as the user, and exposes a much smaller surface area.
The zero-config part is where it gets tricky in practice. I spent a while getting mDNS-based discovery working across different home networks and it's a mess. Half the consumer routers silently drop multicast between subnets, some just rate-limit it into uselessness. You end up layering fallback after fallback (broadcast, then direct probe, then relay) and writing heuristics to pick which path actually works. Having multipath baked into QUIC so the transport just tries all paths and converges on the best one would've saved me a lot of that.
Excuse me if this is explained somewhere, but how does noq/iroh relays QUIC packets between peers? How does relay know which QUIC packets it receives should be sent where, since QUIC is famously hard to track? Do you stream to relay new/retire_connection_id packets through different connection so that it can link them to specific peers? Or is the relayed QUIC wrapped in different protocol?
I’m excited to have a weekend to just sit down and tinker with iroh, it’s been on my list for a while. I want to make an overlay network like nebula with it
Can this establish an QUIC connection without the other end having a CA cert? Or, like most other QUIC libs will it default to only allowing connections to corporation approved domains?
I was just reading the QUIC multipath RFC. Didn't it come out literally yesterday? I guess it's common to have the implementation foreshadowing the RFC but it's jarring to see them back to back like this.
It’s pretty common for IETF drafts to be substantially complete well before they are finalized as RFCs. For example, supporting ML-KEM in TLS is still a draft, but there are already multiple large scale deployments of it since the technical aspects were nailed down a while ago
https://github.com/quinn-rs/quinn/issues/224#issuecomment-38...
It's lovely to see the polite and respectful back and forth in this comment thread where the Iroh folks are talking about deciding to fork. :)
Great interaction. Very refreshing after some of the past problems I've encountered with maintainers treating forks as hostile or "stealing our work".
The message also exposes a reality of how hard it can be to upstream internal changes: They admit they don't have the time to go back and re-submit all of their work as tiny incremental patches that could be reviewed and approved upstream. They estimate it would be on the order of 100 PRs necessary to break it up and get it reviewed. That's a very large time investment for a company that needs to keep moving forward.
Hopefully they stay close in the rest of the implementation details of the project they forked from. After a fork becomes battle-tested enough it might be reasonable to start merging things in larger chunks rather than treating them as incremental development again.
I very much agree, a nice contrast to so much open source drama
disclosure: I work on the team behind noq. Can't emphasize enough that the quinn maintainers are really lovely people, and quinn is an excellent project.
Can confirm! We work closely with them at Datum
iroh seems like a very well positioned product in the era of people rapidly building applications for personal use. I'm really interested in seeing how they continue to grow.
I personally have been looking off and on at providing an "app relay" using it, where people can get an OSS, self-hostable (if desired), zero config way to remotely access their app/data on their network. This would be separate than a "network relay" (a la Tailscale), as this is done selectively as part of the application server and client, requires no knowledge or configuration as the user, and exposes a much smaller surface area.
The zero-config part is where it gets tricky in practice. I spent a while getting mDNS-based discovery working across different home networks and it's a mess. Half the consumer routers silently drop multicast between subnets, some just rate-limit it into uselessness. You end up layering fallback after fallback (broadcast, then direct probe, then relay) and writing heuristics to pick which path actually works. Having multipath baked into QUIC so the transport just tries all paths and converges on the best one would've saved me a lot of that.
Is your project public?
You may be interested in my list here: https://github.com/anderspitman/awesome-tunneling
In particular I believe OpenZiti has a similar focus on embedding the tunnel in the apps.
Excuse me if this is explained somewhere, but how does noq/iroh relays QUIC packets between peers? How does relay know which QUIC packets it receives should be sent where, since QUIC is famously hard to track? Do you stream to relay new/retire_connection_id packets through different connection so that it can link them to specific peers? Or is the relayed QUIC wrapped in different protocol?
Love the folks from n0. I regularly use their sendme cli for peer to peer file transfer!
The iroh team keeps cooking, unreal.
I’m excited to have a weekend to just sit down and tinker with iroh, it’s been on my list for a while. I want to make an overlay network like nebula with it
Can this establish an QUIC connection without the other end having a CA cert? Or, like most other QUIC libs will it default to only allowing connections to corporation approved domains?
cool project. any plans to add typescript support?
> noq (”number 0 QUIC”)
Wouldn't that be n0q then?
I was just reading the QUIC multipath RFC. Didn't it come out literally yesterday? I guess it's common to have the implementation foreshadowing the RFC but it's jarring to see them back to back like this.
It’s pretty common for IETF drafts to be substantially complete well before they are finalized as RFCs. For example, supporting ML-KEM in TLS is still a draft, but there are already multiple large scale deployments of it since the technical aspects were nailed down a while ago
It's been a draft for a long while, and was only recently approved