Why we have stopped making cool protocols like this? It seems Internet had really cool protocols back in the day and we had so many possibilities. Now it seems we are stuck with HTTP.

Not saying HTTP is bad. It just seems like we have given up on possibilities. I remember, almost a decade ago, Nokia had a mobile web server for Symbian devices which basically hosted HTTP server on the phone[0]. You could message the owner of phone directly through a URL. The request would be handled by server on phone!

No one makes anything like that anymore. Everyone is just building on top of APIs and services provided by MANGA who would obviously not put any effort in such projects.

[0]: https://linkdekho.in/254nl

TLS was hard, the implementations kinda sucked, and it turned out that it was important.

So we went through a dark age where "Just open a socket and have at it" couldn't fly over WAN, which means there wasn't much point doing it at all.

QUIC will fix this. You can treat it like a bunch of TCP streams and UDP datagrams that are Just Encrypted.

I'm thinking about doing a toy IRC knock-off with QUIC. Having TLS standardized in the transport layer means less work for the app, and having multiple streams and datagrams means that odd stuff like file transfers or even voice chat could be tacked on without opening new ports or new TCP streams. Matrix is cool and all, but I want something you can just throw down for a few friends and some bots with a shared password. Matrix homeservers are too much work for one-off.

My old New Year's resolution was always "I'm finally gonna get into web dev". But I don't like web browsers. My new resolution will be "I'm gonna do web stuff, without web browsers."

So what's the current approach to use quic from C? All that pops up on a cursory google are repos untouched since 2014.