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Comment by aperturecjs | Hacker News Reader

Hi, author here. Thanks for checking out Bifrost. The short pitch is: any protocol over any transport with seamless cross-platform (browser <-> native) communication.

Building internet applications often involves writing code that is tightly integrated with the choice of communications transport, for example, one has to make the design decision to use either WebSockets or WebRTC, and then all other design decisions are driven by that.

Bifrost aims to allow developing applications without knowing or caring which protocols are used under the hood. The app can just say "Open a stream with peer X" and whatever configured transport(s) make that happen.

I'm still working to improve the docs and new user experience, if you have any suggestions on how I can make it easier to understand, I'd greatly appreciate it!

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I see, thanks. I think it would be useful in the docs to describe both some less technical as well as some technical examples of useful applications of your work.

Do you have some examples of _concrete problems_ that would be easily solved with this? If so, mention them.

Telling folks about technical aspects doesn’t help advertise your work unless you can help a new reader relate it with their own experiences or problems.

Can it work over bluetooh, or with custom "mic to headphone sound-driver protocols"?

Does it include discovering peers on a local network or around you?

Do it handle signaling?

Bluetooth could work! Just need to implement the Transport interface.

Peer discovery is not implemented at the moment but could easily be added (and will be soon). Here's how: any controller can resolve EstablishLinkWithPeer. A peer discovery controller could compare the list of discovered peers with the list of desired connections and initiate connections via UDP when there's a match.

Signaling is managed by the Link implementation. For UDP we use quic-go.

This stack could be the basis of a software to share things no matter your connectivity situation.

You fire it up, it scans things around. Local network? It uses that. Not local but internet, it uses that. Nothing but BT, you can still detect people around, chat and exchange files.

People could be identified by public keys and that's it, not need for an account, signaling done by zeroconf/bt-scanning/bittorent.

Basically a solution to the current chat nightmare.

But the amount of work is overwhelming, even with this.

While we have your attention, does Bifrost support peer multipathing or weights?

There is a design for routing in the repo (and tor-like circuits). However it is not implemented yet. I'd love to grow the community and have more people collaborating on this.

Show an example of how two NAT peers communicate, via hole punching and/or libp2p.

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