Now, see. that's what I said as well. But the rest of the team was tired of me trying to name the hosted iroh "n0des", which I'm now ready to admit was a stretch. And so now here we are spelling n0q as noq. c'est la vie.
disclosure: I work on the team behind noq. Can't emphasize enough that the quinn maintainers are really lovely people, and quinn is an excellent project.
delighted to hear! iroh-blobs is Rüdiger's love letter to BLAKE3, and hot dang has he taken this piece of machinery quite far. Much of this is covered in the post, but some highlights:
* fetch any sub-sequence of bytes, verified on send & receive
* fetch sub-sequences of bytes in collections (sets of blobs / directories)
* store on disk, inlining small blobs into the database for faster lookups
* fan in from disk & the network
* "multi-provider" fan in that can re-plan a fetch on the fly
* should land support for WASM compilation (browsers) soon! https://github.com/n0-computer/iroh-blobs/pull/187
We're hard at work on making the API more ergonomic, but as a foundational protocol it's truly impressive. Rudi has been working with the BLAKE3 authors on both perf testing & the hazmat API.
ah very sorry, I can see how this isn't all that clear. In the comment you've mentioned when I say "custom protocol" I mean a custom QUIC ALPNs: https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc7301
When we talk to mainline it's for discovery, which is separate from iroh connections, which always uses QUIC. Specifically: our fork of quinn, an implementation of QUIC in rust. Iroh is tightly coupled to quinn, and isn't swappable. Getting no_std support for us basically boils down to "can we get quinn to support no_std?". For that, see: https://github.com/quinn-rs/quinn/issues/579
Yeah, no_std is going to be very hard. We need a no_std implementation of QUIC that can be wielded by mere mortals first, which I don't think we'll be able to start on for at least a year.
Right now we can get down to an ESP32, which we think is a decent start.
(disclosure: I work on iroh): you're selling yourself short! All of this is accurate, except for maybe the BGP stuff :)
Dumb Pipe & Sendme me are indeed demos, we do provide a set of default, public relays to use for free. The relay code is also open source, and if you want to pay us we can run a network for you.
We try to provide a few different options for discovery, the one we think has the most general utility is a custom DNS server, but both local mDNS and Bittorrent Mainline are also pluggable options.