WebRTC is lowkey one of the most underrated technologies out there, ESPECIALLY WebRTC data channels.
WebRTC data channels are basically “UDP on the web” but they have lots of controls to change how reliable they are, so they can be used as TCP style connections as well.
I still don’t fully understand why more people don’t use them over something like QUIC. (I think I’ve asked this question before here, but I wasn’t really satisfied with the answers)
I sadly switched off of using them, but mostly because the ecosystem around there is super underdeveloped compared to the ecosystem around QUIC/quinn. There is a LOT of boilerplate involved that feels unnecessary.
But, if you’re making a multiplayer game in the web, it’s basically the best technology to use cuz it already works. And if you use a library like libdatachannel or pion, you could make the game in Go or C++ and compile it for both Steam and the web!
I am so happy that WebRTC has so many implementations. Every developer thinks differently, it's good to have a implementation that matches your mindset.
Sadly, SipSorcery is lagging behind as of now. We only have H.264 and VP8 support for video, data channels only have partial implementation (only reliable ordered), and the performance of data channels is far from what it could be.
But it is a great starting point for anyone working in C#.
torginus 16 hours ago [-]
> I still don’t fully understand why more people don’t use them over something like QUIC
Dealing with NAT traversal especially with full-cone NATs is difficult and expensive - you have to maintain dedicated infrastructure of TURN servers for NAT and you have to proxy all your traffic through that, it's quite the overhead, especially since IPv4 addresses and bandwidth on AWS don't come cheap.
torginus 5 hours ago [-]
Here comes the inevitable HN downvote when for once I talk about something I'm professionally employed to do.
ronsor 17 hours ago [-]
> I still don’t fully understand why more people don’t use them over something like QUIC.
> the ecosystem around there is super underdeveloped compared to the ecosystem around QUIC/quinn
> There is a LOT of boilerplate involved that feels unnecessary
I think you just answered your own question and even gave the answers I would've given.
valorzard 17 hours ago [-]
Well it’s a bit of a chicken or the egg situation right?
None of those issues will get better if no one uses it.
spencerflem 11 hours ago [-]
Im excited for WebTransport for similar reasons. Being peer to peer is really cool though
moffkalast 14 hours ago [-]
The horrible boilerplate and complexity is why people don't use it. Getting even simple usage examples seems to be a tall order for some use cases and LLMs are hopeless in trying to help with it.
P2P connections are also often blocked by ISPs for whatever reason, making it impossible to use without a fallback TURN server which defeats the entire purpose of the thing if you wanted to do scalable multiplayer without the server infrastructure. You're left sending over the whole stream with double the latency and have to eat all the bandwidth.
Sean-Der 17 hours ago [-]
I hope everyone enjoys WebRTC for the Curious (I am one of the authors). If you have any ideas on how to make it better I would love to hear :)
WebRTC is absolutely magical. Having 'Web' in the name does it a disservice. I see it used to.
* Remotely control excavators
* Security Cameras
* Connect autonomous robots in factories
* Low latency streaming from sail boats and rocket ships
* And all the use cases you expect (Conferencing, Telehealth etc..)
fidotron 16 hours ago [-]
My experience is WebRTC has an on-ramp problem, which this is partly to address, but it is significantly helped if you are thrown in the deep end to work on it with someone that knows the quirks already. The big thing I got from that process was to stop being afraid of reading the SDP, because a huge amount of the problems you will run into are really the result of SDP oddities. It is credit to people like the libwebrtc maintainers that the complex morass of MediaStreamTrack processing is as solid and performant as it is these days. (And extendable).
I share the view that it should form the basis of real time communication, humans involved or not, and a/v media involved or not. There seems to be some progress on applying absolute timestamps to frames, for example, however, at some point if we want to have rocket ships using it (and I do too) we will eventually need to have some way to reconcile divergent clocks used at different sources!
Sean is modestly not mentioning Pion here, which is the lower level library many golang people reach to for webrtc components, and deservedly so.
WebRTC's complexity can be frustrating. I believe it is inherent to how many things it is trying to solve. If an alternative arrives that solves everything WebRTC does, it will end up being just as complex.
Or maybe not! Time will tell.
quantadev 13 hours ago [-]
For JavaScript developers "simple-peer" npm package is very popular and makes WebRTC very simple. I don't think its' an on-ramp problem, holding it back, it's just that most apps don't necessarily benefit from P2P coms, and also I'd hazard a guess not many people know about WebRTC, yet. Just guessing.
01HNNWZ0MV43FF 29 minutes ago [-]
In the c++ world I definitely felt the on ramp. Not surprised it is easier in js and go
neom 7 hours ago [-]
WebRTC is amazing! I think it might be helpful for some younger folks if you talked about UDP, I realize it's maybe a bit "weird" - however coming from the UDP world helped me think about all the ways WebRTC can be used. I think it's one of the most underrated and underutilized technologies.
spencerflem 11 hours ago [-]
Thanks so much for the book! Its lovely
Sean-Der 8 hours ago [-]
Of course! Glad you enjoyed it. If you have any feedback on how to make it better I would love to hear :)
lelandbatey 12 hours ago [-]
I cannot thank you enough for writing this; the very first page with the "What, Why and How" is precisely what I wish were written for every "thing" I have ever worked with. It's so clear, and contextualizes so much so quickly, I'm frankly in awe. Thank you for your contributions!
Sean-Der 8 hours ago [-]
Of course!
I think the 'What, Why and How' captures the purpose and joy of learning. Nothing is better then getting lost in a fun problem. I don't want to just understand how it is solved, but the story about how it got solved.
If you have any feedback on how the book could be better would love to hear!
hnlurker22 16 hours ago [-]
Thank you for not calling it WebRTC for Dummies
pavlov 14 hours ago [-]
The “for Dummies” branding is a trademark of the publishing company Wiley, so you need a contract with them to use it.
hnlurker22 13 hours ago [-]
Tell me you wrote a for dummies book without telling you wrote a for dummies book
adhamsalama 17 hours ago [-]
I like this book, but it doesn't contain any code examples, so it wasn't useful to me.
I ended up adopting code from the High Performance Browser Networking book and some code examples by Google that were written like 8 years ago. It was painful to replace the outdated APIs with new ones and rewrite in TypeScript, but I eventually did it.
Probably the coolest projects I have ever done, and they contain almost no backend code at all (I am a backend dev).
quantadev 13 hours ago [-]
For all those into WebRTC, I just ran across this Reddit topic (link below), and the very latest post is one about a Chat App that was apparently just completed last week:
It mentions Nostr, and makes me realize both Nostr and WebRTC can work well together. I haven't checked, but I'd guess there are Nostr apps using WebRTC to send Nostr messages around. I mean Nostr is basically just a crypto-signed JSON object.
amelius 16 hours ago [-]
Can webrtc technology be used to pierce through corporate firewalls?
Sean-Der 16 hours ago [-]
Yep! ICE lets you try a bunch of different ports and protocols.
So you can have a remote peer and try to contact it via UDP/TCP/TLS. You can even attempt via multiple interfaces (Wifi and 5G).
You can then measure the packet loss/latency across these different paths and figure out which one is best.
curious_curios 16 hours ago [-]
Likely yes, via TURN servers.
dboreham 16 hours ago [-]
No. It doesn't allow anything that can't be done by a browser behind a firewall connecting to a regular web server outside the firewall.
WebRTC data channels are basically “UDP on the web” but they have lots of controls to change how reliable they are, so they can be used as TCP style connections as well.
I still don’t fully understand why more people don’t use them over something like QUIC. (I think I’ve asked this question before here, but I wasn’t really satisfied with the answers)
I sadly switched off of using them, but mostly because the ecosystem around there is super underdeveloped compared to the ecosystem around QUIC/quinn. There is a LOT of boilerplate involved that feels unnecessary.
But, if you’re making a multiplayer game in the web, it’s basically the best technology to use cuz it already works. And if you use a library like libdatachannel or pion, you could make the game in Go or C++ and compile it for both Steam and the web!
Here’s a project I did with them that shows off compiled for both web and desktop: https://github.com/ValorZard/gopher-combat
* https://github.com/shinyoshiaki/werift-webrtc (Typescript)
* https://github.com/pion/webrtc (Golang)
* https://github.com/webrtc-rs/webrtc (Rust)
* https://github.com/algesten/str0m (Rust)
* hhttps://github.com/sepfy/libpeer (C/Embedded)
* https://webrtc.googlesource.com/src/ (C++)
* https://github.com/sipsorcery-org/sipsorcery (C#)
* https://github.com/paullouisageneau/libdatachannel (C++)
* https://github.com/elixir-webrtc (Elixir)
* https://github.com/aiortc/aiortc (Python)
* GStreamer’s webrtcbin (C)
See https://github.com/sipsorcery/webrtc-echoes for examples of some running against each other.
But it is a great starting point for anyone working in C#.
Dealing with NAT traversal especially with full-cone NATs is difficult and expensive - you have to maintain dedicated infrastructure of TURN servers for NAT and you have to proxy all your traffic through that, it's quite the overhead, especially since IPv4 addresses and bandwidth on AWS don't come cheap.
> the ecosystem around there is super underdeveloped compared to the ecosystem around QUIC/quinn
> There is a LOT of boilerplate involved that feels unnecessary
I think you just answered your own question and even gave the answers I would've given.
P2P connections are also often blocked by ISPs for whatever reason, making it impossible to use without a fallback TURN server which defeats the entire purpose of the thing if you wanted to do scalable multiplayer without the server infrastructure. You're left sending over the whole stream with double the latency and have to eat all the bandwidth.
WebRTC is absolutely magical. Having 'Web' in the name does it a disservice. I see it used to.
* Remotely control excavators
* Security Cameras
* Connect autonomous robots in factories
* Low latency streaming from sail boats and rocket ships
* And all the use cases you expect (Conferencing, Telehealth etc..)
I share the view that it should form the basis of real time communication, humans involved or not, and a/v media involved or not. There seems to be some progress on applying absolute timestamps to frames, for example, however, at some point if we want to have rocket ships using it (and I do too) we will eventually need to have some way to reconcile divergent clocks used at different sources!
Sean is modestly not mentioning Pion here, which is the lower level library many golang people reach to for webrtc components, and deservedly so.
WebRTC's complexity can be frustrating. I believe it is inherent to how many things it is trying to solve. If an alternative arrives that solves everything WebRTC does, it will end up being just as complex.
Or maybe not! Time will tell.
I think the 'What, Why and How' captures the purpose and joy of learning. Nothing is better then getting lost in a fun problem. I don't want to just understand how it is solved, but the story about how it got solved.
If you have any feedback on how the book could be better would love to hear!
I ended up adopting code from the High Performance Browser Networking book and some code examples by Google that were written like 8 years ago. It was painful to replace the outdated APIs with new ones and rewrite in TypeScript, but I eventually did it.
https://github.com/adhamsalama/webrtc/
Then I used it with WebAssembly to run a distributed SQLite database in the browser for peer-to-peer collaboration.
https://github.com/adhamsalama/sqlite-wasm-webrtc
Probably the coolest projects I have ever done, and they contain almost no backend code at all (I am a backend dev).
https://www.reddit.com/r/WebRTC/comments/1jwwfj5/quanta_chat...
It mentions Nostr, and makes me realize both Nostr and WebRTC can work well together. I haven't checked, but I'd guess there are Nostr apps using WebRTC to send Nostr messages around. I mean Nostr is basically just a crypto-signed JSON object.
So you can have a remote peer and try to contact it via UDP/TCP/TLS. You can even attempt via multiple interfaces (Wifi and 5G).
You can then measure the packet loss/latency across these different paths and figure out which one is best.
Dependent on the firewall, but most I have seen allow NAT mapping with different behaviors.