tomas_p

I have written enough holepunching code by hand to be wary of anything that promises to make it pleasant. Iroh mostly delivers. Dialing by public key is the right abstraction, and the connection it hands you is a real authenticated QUIC stream, not a leaky wrapper you have to fight.

I cared about two things: how it behaves when the direct path fails, and what it costs me in allocations on the hot path. The relay fallback is transparent and fast enough that a multipath workload did not stutter when I killed the direct route mid-transfer. Throughput stayed close to a hand-rolled QUIC baseline, which is high praise from me.

The modularity is the quiet win. I pulled in only the pieces I needed instead of swallowing a framework whole. If you are building peer-to-peer anything in Rust, this saves you the most miserable six months of the project.