It would be nice if dumbpipe revealed the local and remote IP and UDP port numbers via something like STDERR or a signal so that apps could send UDP datagrams on them with ordinary socket calls. I'm guessing that QUIC uses a unique header in its first few bytes, so the app could choose something different and not interfere with the reliable stream.

A better solution would be to expose the iroh send_datagram and read_datagram calls somehow. Maybe if dumbpipe accepted a datagram flag like -d, then a second connection to a peer could be opened. It would recognize that the peer has already been found and maybe reuse the iroh instance. Then the app could send over either stream when it needs to be reliable or best effort.

This missing datagram feature was the first thing I thought of too when I read the post, so it's disappointing that it doesn't discuss it. Mostly all proof of concept tools like this are MVP, so don't attempt to be feature-complete, which forces the user to either learn the entirety of the library just to use it, or fork it and build their own.

IMHO that's really disappointing and defeats the purpose of most software today, since developers are programmed to think that the "do one thing and do it well" unix philosophy is the only philosophy. It's a pet peeve of mine because nearly the entirety of the labor I'm forced to perform is about working around these artificial and unintentional limitations.

Ok I just looked at https://www.dumbpipe.dev/install.sh

  if [ "$OS" = "Windows_NT" ]; then
      echo "Error: this installer only works on linux & macOS." 1>&2
      exit 1
  else

> It would be nice if dumbpipe revealed the local and remote IP and UDP port numbers via something like STDERR or a signal so that apps could send UDP datagrams on them with ordinary socket calls.

I believe this would be even more unreliable than UDP, since Iroh is also capable of using a relay server for when hole punching can't be performed, and Iroh also handles IP migration.

> it appears to be linux and macOS only

Iroh should work on Windows, IIUC, just the installer and possibly prebuilt binaries aren't provided. But dumbpipe isn't designed for UDP anyways, it's closer to a competitor for socat/nc.