I'm well aware of these things actually lol, it's pretty obvious that if the protocol is built on top of UDP it'd need to implement some FSM to handle retransmission and flow control

> A lot of the challenges that are part of implementing HTTP/2 correctly are also present in QUIC

I'd dispute this because it doesn't have nested flight windows, and doesn't have to multiplex and interleave streams over the same tunnel (it does that over the same socket/port, but it's way easier because UDP is a stateless packet machine-gun, so you don't need to keep both TCP and SPDY's concept of a stream at the same time).

It has about the same challenges of implementing TCP correctly (which is what you'd expect really), because it needs to implement congestion control and etc pretty much in all the same places, the only "extra" it shares with SPDY is stream multiplexing (which is still much simpler because it doesn't need to worry about TCP's semantics on top of it).

> resource wise, it might never catch up with HTTP/1.1 + TLS (I think you meant TCP here) due to missing hardware support

I have two comments about this:

1 - This is actually more of a software problem than a hardware problem. Hardware acceleration for QUIC depends mostly on evolving the tooling we have for "talking" to our network cards across different platforms than anything else really.

For a while now, most NICs (especially those you'd see in data-center gear) use a Motorola 68k based chip, or something else equally programmable, and offloading arbitrary programs to those is already something that happens quite often. For example, Linux XDP programs are automatically offloaded to the NIC if it supports that.

This is also not a problem for middle-boxes, since they just treat UDP blindly as UDP and will just do AQM on top of it like they always did, no need to implement flow control.

This might be a problem for legacy consumer hardware, but then again those are already inefficient in all kinds of ways, and for these cases being able to run the entire networking stack from userland is actually a benefit: being able to fallback on full-software implementations means we can make Windows XP support QUIC if we wanted to. Can we even measure how much shit we'd break if we tried to "upgrade" TCP?

2 - This might be underestimating the amortized gains from switching to a more efficient protocol: having to retransmit less data, 0-rtt handshakes, and such things add up.

Specifically for HTTP1.1, being a text based protocol doesn't help either: how many CPU cycles do we waste with parsing CRLFs, lowercasing headers, and crap like that? At least HTTP2 doesn't suffer from these problems, but it still screwed up transport big time.

> I feel like at least in some areas the QUIC specification became less complex

This I agree with, wholeheartedly.

So far, the only thing I've found absolutely detestable about it is mandated encryption, as that prohibits me from outsourcing some L7 intelligence to a proxy/sidecar/service-mesh/whatever, and having to shoehorn some bullshit certificate between my application and the proxy so that it can have some visibility into traffic will be error prone and annoying.

Maybe we'll make a variant of QUIC with TLS disabled for gRPC and other API shennanigans? We'll see when the time comes...