Comment

Comment by still_grokking

WebRTC? I'm not sure WebRTC has a bright future.

AFAIK nobody ever implemented WebRTC on top of QUIC. The new kid on the block is called WebTransport.

WebTransport could be described in short as "WebRTC / WebSocket, the good parts". It's way simpler than WebRTC and solves some issues with WebSocket like the lack of low-latency unreliable transport (WebTransport can send Datagrams without having to use a reliable connection channel for that). A big difference to WebRTC is: All the STUN / TURN complexity is gone. WebTransport gives you at the end more or less almost "raw" QUIC streams or datagrams. It's almost like a socket interface for web user agents, only with all the features of QUIC.

Given you have already HTTP/3 (which implies you have also QUIC) WebTransport is a pretty simple and slim addition on top:

https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/draft-ietf-webtrans-ht...

(The only thing I'm missing is client authentication. It would be really good to do this in-band, and for example allow to send client certs with the WebTransport CONNECT request. For some reason this was left out on purpose. Only that I did not find out why actually.)

What I'm not sure about is who good WebTransport would be in a P2P scenario. But given libp2p implemented WebTransport it would seem that it's good for that also. (So could replace WebRTC completely.)

Discussion

Live from the official Hacker News API

A modern reader for Hacker News · SvelteKit + Skeleton