webrtc-nuts-and-bolts VS p2p-webtransport

I recommend WebRTC For The Curious too, as another comment. Personally, I didn't use WebRTC in C#, but the WebRTC concepts are nearly the same in every different language/platform. Also, you can check out my project and documentation on internals of WebRTC, written in Go and JavaScript: https://github.com/adalkiran/webrtc-nuts-and-bolts . It's not related directly, but another example of usage at my other project, written in Go, Python, and JavaScript: https://github.com/adalkiran/distributed-inference .

I am heavily biased toward WebRTC. Here is my take on it though!

> It's incredibly complex as a specification

What is complex about it? I can go and read the IETF drafts, webrtcforthecurious.com, https://github.com/adalkiran/webrtc-nuts-and-bolts and multiple implementations.

QUIC/WebTransport seems simple because it doesn't address all the things WebRTC does.

> has limitations and numerous issues that set limits in how scalable it can be

https://phenixrts.com/en-us/ does 500k viewers. I don't think anything about WebRTC makes it unscalable.

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IMO the future is WebRTC.

* Diverse users makes the ecosystem rich. WebRTC supports Conferencing, embedded, P2P/NAT Traversal, remote control... Every group of users has the made the ecosystem a little better.

* Client code is minimal. For most users they just need to exchange Session Descriptions and they are done. You then additional APIs if you need to change behaviors.

* Lots of implementations. C, C++, Python, Go, Typescript

Show HN: WebRTC Nuts and Bolts, A holistic way of understanding how WebRTC runs\ (0 comments)

You can find it at: https://github.com/adalkiran/webrtc-nuts-and-bolts

> I just wish WebRTC wasn't so prescriptive of DTLS/SRTP.

There was a webrtc-webtransport spec, but it got renamed to p2p-webtransport[1]. I'm not sure when the rename happened. Feels like a pretty strong indicator of webrtc being deconstructed, but whose to say this goes anywhere. We'd also need webcodecs.

It's somewhat scary & also somewhat exciting thinking of the one good, working, browser supported standard being ripped into pieces (p2p-webtransport, webcodecs, more) & being user-implemented. Having the browser & servers have a well-known target is both great but also perhaps confining. If we leave it up to each site/library to DIY their solution, figure out how to balance the p2p feeds, it'll be a long long time before the Rest of the World (other than the very big few) have reasonable tech again. WebRTC is quite capable & a nice even playing field, with lots of well-known rules to enable creative interopation. We'd be throwing away a lot. I'd hoped for webrtc-webtransport, to at least keep some order & regularity, but that seems out, at the moment. But Webrtc-nv is still ultra-formative; anything could happen.

The rest of the transport stack is also undergoing massive seismic shifts. I feel like we're in for a lot of years of running QUIC or HTTP3 over WebRTC Data-Channels and over WebTransport, so we can explore solutions the new capabilities while not having to ram each & every change through with the browser implementers. It feels like a less visible but far more massive Web Extensibility Manifesto moment, only at sub-HTML levels[2]. The browsers refused to let us play with HTTP Push, never let appdevs know realtime resources had been pushed at the browser, so we're still debating terrible WebSocket vs SSE choices; terrible. I think of gRPC-web & what an abomination that is, how sad & pointless that effort is; all because the browser is a mere glimmer of the underlying transport. I feel like a lot of experimentation & exploration is going to happen if we start exploring QUIC or HTTP3 over WebTransport. Attempts to reimagine alternatives to WebRTC are also possible if we had specs like p2p-webtransport, or just did QUIC over DataChannels. Running modern protocols in the client, not the browser, seems like a semi-cursed future, but necessary, at least for a while, while we don't yet know what we could do. The browsers are super laggy, slow to expose capabilities.

[1] https://github.com/w3c/p2p-webtransport

[2] https://github.com/extensibleweb/manifesto