We have plenty of very deep technical content on our blog, explaining features of QUIC such as 0-rtt, post-quantum key exchange, address validation tokens, embedded devices.

A great thing about iroh is that due to it being just QUIC, when you learn about iroh you also learn about details of QUIC that are useful and transferrable for traditional p2p QUIC connections.

Not to mention that the title of the post doesn't even say what it is.

Thanks, we agree! We used to have bindings for while but the maintenance burden at that point was too high. Now that 1.0 guarantees everyone some stability and we feel confident in the library, we have enough room to properly support it.

Holepunch, formerly hypercore, formerly dat, is a great project. Their main language is js, which makes it difficult to embed into anything but js/ts applications.

Also, they are very principled when it comes to peer to peer purity, whereas iroh is a bit more pragmatic. We use dedicated relays to faciliate hole punching, whereas holepunch tries to use other peers as a temporary relay for hole punching messages.

Another difference is that holepunch have their own DHT, where we have a less decentralised address lookup service by default and use the mainline DHT as a fully p2p alternative.

So TLDR if you are doing js in the browser, holepunch.to might be a good fit. If you work on native mobile apps or embedded devices, iroh will be better since it is pretty frugal. If you work with node.js, both will work. Just evaluate them both and use what works better for you.

E.g. we support tiny embedded devices such as esp32. https://www.iroh.computer/blog/iroh-on-esp32

As I see, it tries to explain.

But as someone who's not a network specialist, I fail to see how this is not a glorified P2P DNS.

Maybe this example helps:

https://github.com/n0-computer/iroh#rust-library

    const ALPN: &[u8] = b"iroh-example/echo/0";

    let endpoint = Endpoint::bind().await?;

    // Open a connection to the accepting endpoint
    let conn = endpoint.connect(addr, ALPN).await?;

    // Open a bidirectional QUIC stream
    let (mut send, mut recv) = conn.open_bi().await?;

    // Send some data to be echoed
    send.write_all(b"Hello, world!").await?;
    send.finish()?;

    // Receive the echo
    let response = recv.read_to_end(1000).await?;
    assert_eq!(&response, b"Hello, world!");

    // As the side receiving the last application data - say goodbye
    conn.close(0u32.into(), b"bye!");

    // Close the endpoint and all its connections
    endpoint.close().await;

Such is life when you choose to be introduced to something by a version update blogpost, instead of clicking in the top-left corner and reading the landing page.

This is true. But you could click the name in the top left. Or Docs.

IP addresses break, dial keys instead

Modular networking stack for direct, peer-to-peer connections between devices

iroh establishes direct connections whenever possible, falling back to relay servers if necessary. Get fast, efficient, reliable connections that are authenticated and encrypted end-to-end using QUIC.

Your phone and laptop don't have stable IPs, let alone DNS entries pointing to them.

What you're missing is that they can't charge you for IP's, and someone else already charges you for DNS/domains. They would like to replace your IP's with keys they lookup. It's a cool idea and I would expect that they'll find a market, but I'm not sure this would be a breakthrough product for me