It feels like such a huge missed opportunity that QUIC is just so bad at multiplexing different concerns. I get that the limitation that DoDQ runs on port 853 is in part a feature, that separating it's network traffic is in some ways/cases desireable, but that DoDQ can't also be useful- for an operator who wants to- over port 80, is as much a limitation of QUIC's intent/design as it is a conscious design decision made by the RFC; there's not really another way to do it, short of generating some new protocol signaling system. Rather than being a raft we can tie more concerns to, QUIC is a prototype we have to keep building yet more and more ships from the skeleton of. I wish QUIC were more ambitious, aimed to encapsulate more varied concerns by it's nature, rather than leaving each protocol to fork off the core.

I keep seeing this wonderful flexible multicast new protocol (QUIC), but see these really big ways it limits what it wants to take on in really harmful ways. The unreliable datagrams spec, for example, punted entirely on multiplexing[1]. Every unreliable protocol that needs different "streams"/channels then has to go invent streams all over again, but there's no guarantee the different implementations will be compatible & able to share the one and only unreliable data-channel datagrams affords. This is easily witnessable in MASQUE[2].

Ideally I'd like to see some kind of standard for declaring protocol, so different streams of different protocols can "just work" over a shared QUIC connection. And I'd like to see streams brought to datagrams, with perhaps one shared/default "global" (per-connection) stream alike what we have now. There's so much good protocol work here, but we keep being just short of making it easy to layer things in; so close, but falling in critical areas for lack of ambition.

[1] https://quicwg.org/datagram/draft-ietf-quic-datagram.html#na...

[2] https://blog.cloudflare.com/unlocking-quic-proxying-potentia... https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30744739 (4 points, 57d ago, 2 comments)