QUIC is not quick enough over fast internet

Curl creator/maintainer Daniel Stenberg blogged about HTTP/3 in curl a few months ago: https://daniel.haxx.se/blog/2024/06/10/http-3-in-curl-mid-20...

One of the things he highlighted was the higher CPU utilization of HTTP/3, to the point where CPU can limit throughput.

I wonder how much of this is due to the immaturity of the implementations, and how much this is inherit due to way QUIC was designed?

"immaturity of the implementations" is a funny wording here. QUIC was created because there is absolutely NO WAY that all internet hardware (including all middleware etc) out there will support a new TCP or TLS standard. So QUIC is an elegant solution to get a new transport standard on top of legacy internet hardware (on top of UDP).

In an ideal World we would create a new TCP and TLS standard and replace and/or update all internet routers and hardware everywhere World Wide so that it is implemented with less CPU utilization ;)

A major mistake in IP’s design was to allow middle boxes. The protocol should have had some kind of minimal header auth feature to intentionally break them. It wouldn’t have to be strong crypto, just enough to make middle boxes impractical.

It would have forced IPv6 migration immediately (no NAT) and forced endpoints to be secured with local firewalls and better software instead of middle boxes.

The Internet would be so much simpler, faster, and more capable. Peer to peer would be trivial. Everything would just work. Protocol innovation would be possible.

Of course tech is full of better roads not taken. We are prisoners of network effects and accidents of history freezing ugly hacks into place.