Quic_dist - QUIC carrier for Erlang Distribution Protocol

Hi,
quic_dist is QUIC carrier for Erlang Distribution Protocol i.e. it allows you to use QUIC for connecting your Erlang/Elixir nodes.

Check it out here GitHub - mickel8/quic_dist: QUIC carrier for Erlang Distribution Protocol

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Can you maybe (either here or in README - or both) explain to us what this is all about and why would you want to use it? Generally I find it useful, and is probably helpful for adoption if indeed it is useful for people.

In this case I have vague idea of existence of QUIC protocol, but many probably don’t even know as much, and how does switching to it help (and in which cases) from TCP/IP when setting up Erlang clusters I can suspect only based on my vague understanding of QUIC…

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Great question!

Here is how I see quic_dist

  • QUIC is a secure protocol, there is no way to send unecrypted data with it, at least there wasn’t when I checked last time. This means that we should compare quic_dist with TCP + TLS at first.
  • QUIC allows for both relabile and unreliable transfers. Long term goal is to allow user to choose how to send message. Unrelaible datagrams could be benefitial e.g. in multimedia severs
  • connection establishment time between nodes that use QUIC instead of TCP + TLS should be shorter. This will matter only in scenario where for some reason nodes connects and disconnects continously.
  • it might be worth checking and compering QUIC congestion control and flow control mechanisms with TCP + TLS. Also, ACK mechanism is wort looking at.

A lot of questions here, I need to do experiments :slightly_smiling_face:

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There are a few threads about it on Devtalk as well if anyone’s interested, including a blog post by an Elixir user:
https://forum.devtalk.com/tag/quic

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Awesome thanks!