Table of Contents

• Protocol packages
  • blobs — content-addressed transfer
  • gossip — pub/sub over a mesh
  • docs — multi-writer documents
  • endpointticket, blobs tickets, and the ticket registry
  • postcard, irpc, quicconn, watch, metrics
  • Next steps

Protocol packages

blobs, gossip, docs, tickets, postcard, irpc, and quicconn — what each Go package implements and how much of the Rust protocol it covers.

Beyond connectivity, go-iroh ports the iroh protocol stack. Each package below targets the wire format of the corresponding Rust crate; each one also states its own coverage in its package doc, and those statements are the honest scope — read them before assuming full parity.

All three main protocols are ALPN-routed, so they mount behind the same iroh.Router as your own protocols.

blobs — content-addressed transfer

The package “defines Rust-compatible iroh blob tickets, blob identifiers, and transfer helpers”. Content is named by a 32-byte BLAKE3 Hash; a blob ticket combines a provider endpoint address with a hash and a format, encoded as the blob kind prefix followed by RFC 4648 base32 without padding.

Scope, stated in the package doc: “The transfer helpers implement the raw full-blob subset of the iroh-blobs provider protocol.” Serving is ServeBlob / ServeBlobStreams over a Store; fetching is DownloadBlob, DownloadBlobRange, GetBlobBytes, GetManyBlobBytes, plus DownloadBlobParallel for range-parallel fetches into an io.WriterAt. Verified decoding of BAO-encoded bytes is available directly through DecodeBlob*, and Observe streams Bitfield updates for a hash.

gossip — pub/sub over a mesh

The Go package doc scopes itself narrowly: “The package implements the unidirectional stream framing used by iroh-gossip. Higher-level topic orchestration and discovery live in later layers.” In practice the shipped surface is NewGossip(ep, opts...), Topic, Sender/Receiver, JoinOptions and an Event stream with NeighborUp-style kinds — the membership and broadcast machinery (HyParView, PlumTree) lives in internal/gossipproto.

gossip.Discovery is a peer-discovery service built on a gossip topic; it implements the address-lookup interfaces, so it can be registered like any other discovery service. DefaultDiscoveryTopic is derived from the string iroh-gossip-discovery-v1.

Gossip has its own live Rust interop gate; see Testing and interop.

For the protocol’s design, read upstream’s iroh-gossip documentation.

docs — multi-writer documents

docs implements the iroh-docs data and sync protocols. Upstream describes the protocol as “multi-dimensional key-value documents with an efficient synchronization protocol”; note the vocabulary, which the Go package keeps: namespaces (a replica’s identity and write capability), authors, entries, and range-based set reconciliation.

The Go package doc states its coverage: “the stable value types used to share document capabilities out of band, an in-memory entry store, the iroh-docs sync protocol over an iroh Router, and live synchronization over iroh-gossip.” The notable absence relative to Rust is persistent storage — the shipped store is in-memory.

Key types: Author/AuthorID, NamespaceID/NamespaceSecret, Capability (read or write), Entry, Record, and DocTicket for sharing a capability plus bootstrap addresses out of band.

endpointticket, blobs tickets, and the ticket registry

endpointticket encodes an address as a string starting with endpoint followed by lowercase base32 without padding. blobs and docs define their own kinds (blob, doc) and register into an endpointticket.Registry, so a program can decode any ticket kind it has registered.

postcard, irpc, quicconn, watch, metrics

• postcard — the Rust-compatible postcard wire codec used by the protocol packages and shared with the experiment modules.
• irpc — postcard-framed request/response helpers over an iroh connection: a generic Call[Req, Resp] returning a response iterator, and Handler.
• quicconn — “implements no application protocol of its own” (its package doc); it provides a QUIC-like surface over iroh.Conn so an HTTP/3 implementation can run over iroh without another QUIC stack. The h3iroh experiment module is the worked example.
• watch — observable values, the Go analog of Rust’s n0_watcher; this is what WatchAddr and HomeRelayStatus return.
• metrics — a small OpenMetrics registry for endpoint counters.

Next steps

• Ecosystem map — experiment modules that build on these.
• Testing and interop — which of these are checked against Rust, and how.
• API map — package-by-package entry points.