To me this sounds like tailscale - does anyone have any insight into how what this is doing is similar or different?
I love Tailscale, it's deployed on all my devices. But I might check this out for the transports part in particular.
I love MagicDNS - A long time ago I wrote a stupid Python script to have it continually generate MagicDNS names until one of them contained a word I was looking for.
IIUC you just send someone 'here is the connection information' and it just works automatically.
That being said, I think our use of QUIC multipath is pretty novel. If you use tailscale or a VPN, your connection (TCP or QUIC or whatever) won't immediately notice when the underlying transport changes (e.g. relay to direct or vice versa). So there will be some delays as the congestion controller learns about the underlying transport.
With the latest iroh using QUIC multipath, each path gets its own congestion controller, so switches of the underlying transport are more smooth.
Also, multipath allows us to treat custom transports as just additional paths.
On the technical level, the biggest difference is probably that we build on QUIC whereas tailscale builds on wireguard. Iroh is a library that is made to embed into your application, whereas the tailscale offering started as a daemon. It allows embedding, but you are still carrying the baggage of a go runtime. Iroh is written in rust. Rust compiles to a native library and is therefore easier and more lightweight to embed in compiled programs (C, C++) and languages such as js and python.
Another big internal difference is that we use relay URLs whereas tailscale is using relay IDs. The consequence is that every iroh endpoint, no matter if using self-hosted relays, the n0 public relays, or the n0 paid relays, can reach any other. In tailscale two nodes will only be able to talk if they use the same mapping from relay id to relay ip address, which usually means that they use the same coordination server.
Last but not least, while we do have a commercial offering, everything you need to run iroh is open source, licensed MIT and Apache2. With tailscale the coordination server is closed source and operated by tailscale, and the only way to run your own tailnet is to use the headscale community project.
Tailscale is great for bringing devices/apps into a secure network when I cannot modify them in any way. If I have full access to the source code for everything, the story changes completely.
Then it's no longer p2p? If I wanted to avoid paying cloud egress costs, then I would need a p2p solution.
>Tailscale is great for bringing devices/apps into a secure network when I cannot modify them in any way. If I have full access to the source code for everything, the story changes completely.
Naturally, but this thread isn't about Tailscale, its about Iroh. You were the one that claimed Tailscale can already do what Iroh can. But I've pointed out a usecase where Tailscale wouldn't suffice that Iroh can accomplish.