macdriver VS qmux

The first big release of the year was the macdriver project, which got a significant response on Hacker News. It gives us Objective-C and Apple framework bindings for Go, letting you build simple Apple apps entirely from Go. That wasn't possible before, so it was a little exciting, but it was early. The native Go APIs included for commonly used Foundation and Cocoa classes were far from complete. They could still be used if you knew what you were doing, but with an ideal of total coverage of Apple frameworks, that wouldn't be enough. There were also unresolved issues just deciding how to best manage memory and pointers, which I knew would fall on me to figure out and take some time.

Even less common are schemas for non-web APIs. In 2016, Electron started releasing a JSON schema of all their APIs that allowed me to build a bridge to use Electron APIs from Go. I had that prototype in mind when I started the macdriver project that was released a couple months ago. Right now we're manually wrapping Apple framework classes with Go types so you can write native Apple platform applications that look like this:

It started as a demo for macdriver, but over the last week or so I've been making a standalone version. 90% of that time was playing around with it while trying to make demos.

Done https://github.com/progrium/macdriver/issues/12

The connection multiplexing layer is based on qmux, a subset of SSH that I've written about previously. It was designed to optionally be swapped out with QUIC as needed. Either way, everything in qtalk happens over flow-controlled channels, which can be used like embedded TCP streams. Whatever you do with qtalk, you can also tunnel other connections and protocols on the same connection.

Unrelated to macdriver, I released a protocol called qmux with a post explaining why this (but really any) muxing protocol, including and especially QUIC, is such a great primitive for network programming. The project came with two implementations, Go and TypeScript, with more on the way. The post about it was the first explainer article I'd done in a while and people liked it. This was important because the idea behind it was really more valuable than the protocol itself, but regardless we still need implementations of it to exist. To show the idea in action, I built a 130 line version of Ngrok, which turned into a great post walking through how it works.

What qmux does is give us a subset of the SSH protocol to multiplex many connections over a single connection. It was the missing piece of my original Twisted prototype. You can read more about how there aren't a lot of these protocols (but perhaps with QUIC are also the future of the Internet) in my previous post.

If nothing else, I hope people use this story as inspiration to think about using multiplexing to design better, simpler application protocols. Even if for some reason QUIC isn't the future, you now have qmux!