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Comment by StartingAbusine | Hacker News Reader

Why native code?

I would think this could be done completely in the browser using WebRTC?

Iroh networking isn’t available in browser, and presents some cool ways to link things together - i suspect the connection by using iroh is more robust and solid than webrtc, but i’m just guessing.

There are some projects that implement an iroh webrtc custom transport that works in the browser. E.g. https://iroh-webrtc-demo.datei.jetzt/#?addpeer=fd4341f14b4eb...

But iroh is designed bare metal first, we currently support the browser via WASM, but only with relay mode.

We will solve browser eventually, but I think it is a mistake to build peer to peer tech browser first. We think it is better to make it extremely efficient on bare metal first, and then grow into the restricted browser ecosystem where possible.

Browsers are very restricted environments.

WebRTC only works in very specific conditions, most of the time you'll need a TURN server anyway, so it's probably better to just use an Iroh relay (you can run your own)

I see P2P working 80%+ of the time for my deployments. Other people have posted data about this also https://medium.com/the-making-of-appear-in/the-most-likely-t...

P2P is better then TURN/Iroh Relay. Even if traffic is encrypted the size of what you are passing through is valuable metadata. Or the time at what you send things. P2P is always better for users.

Of course P2P is better, my point was that it doesn't work in the browser most of the times, and your link seems to corroborate it.

That is strictly true but there are work arounds. For example you can talk to an Iroh relay server from inside of a browser. You can also get round this with extensions. Unfortunately Google whitelist who can do this but it can be done on Safari.

the tl;dr seems to be simply that it wasn't implemented yet

i've been pretty interested in this as well and got this snippet from chatgpt: `So could Iroh add direct browser-to-native connections without a proxy? Yes, by adding WebRTC support to the native side as well. Iroh’s own browser roadmap describes that approach and identifies the additional native WebRTC stack as a significant dependency cost. It does not describe a fundamental impossibility.`

i may take a stab at adding this functionality soon

There are several pure browser iroh custom transport implementations that use webrtc. The challenge would be to have this also work with native clients, preferably without blowing up the binary so much that we can no longer ship it to resource constrained devices.

I won't like - webrtc will probably never graduate to a built-in transport. But we would be very happy about a bare metal webrtc transport and link it from our official docs for people that need it.

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