libp2p / libp2p/rust-libp2p

webrtc: allow dialing without listening first

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difficulty:hard
Dominant language
Rust
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Description

Description

Currently, the WebRTC implementation requires us to establish a listener before we can dial a connection. See https://github.com/libp2p/rust-libp2p/blob/14530af2611b0cb17179f83802d31c0f28222e91/transports/webrtc/src/tokio/transport.rs#L134.

Not only is this a general short-coming of the implementation, it also complicates things in our interop-tests. In particular, we need to do a Swarm::listen_on before we can perform a dial: https://github.com/zvolin/rust-libp2p/blob/3c833dd6e9d1c069826c889e090f3b11cd4ad355/interop-tests/src/lib.rs#L44-L51

This makes the interop-tests for dial-only transports such as webtransport-websys unnecessarily complicated. This is the reason why we need to feature-gate the listening on cfg(target_arch = "wasm32"). Ideally, we would just move the listening to the is_dialer = false branch but due to the above limitation of the WebRTC transport, that is not possible.

For QUIC, we solve this with a dedicated dialer state: https://github.com/libp2p/rust-libp2p/blob/14530af2611b0cb17179f83802d31c0f28222e91/transports/quic/src/transport.rs#L73-L74

Are you planning to do it yourself in a pull request?

No.

Contributor guide

Open the contributing guide

First steps

  1. Read the whole issue, then the project's contributing guide.
  2. Comment on the issue to say you are picking it up — it saves two people doing the same work.
  3. Fork the repository and make your change on a branch.
  4. Open a pull request that references the issue number.

Research direction

Start in transports/webrtc/src/tokio/transport.rs at the listener-dependent dialing path, then compare the dedicated dialer state in transports/quic/src/transport.rs. Review interop-tests/src/lib.rs to understand the current listen-before-dial workaround. Done means WebRTC can dial without establishing a listener first and the interop-test workaround is no longer required.

Written by the indexing model from the issue text.

Assessment

Tech stack
rust
Domain
networking
Issue type
Feature
Difficulty
4/5
Estimated time
3-5 days
Activity status
Stale
Clarity
Mostly clear
Newbie friendliness
48/100

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