I maintain gumdrop, an async, non-blocking Java server framework. Last year I wanted to add HTTP/3 support, and ran into a wall: the Java ecosystem essentially doesn't have QUIC. The JDK's own experimental support (JEP 517) is client-only. Netty gets HTTP/3 by shelling out to quiche + BoringSSL over JNI — which works, but you're back to native builds, platform-specific binaries, and a C library sitting underneath your "pure Java" framework. I used that approach first. It was clumsy enough that I went looking for a pure-Java alternative.
There's exactly one: Kwik. But Kwik is blocking per connection — one thread per QUIC connection.
That's a non-starter for a framework built around single-threaded selector loops handling tens of thousands of concurrent connections. So I wrote a QUIC implementation from scratch: packet protection, loss detection and NewReno congestion control, connection migration, 0-RTT, QPACK, an HTTP/3 client and server — all driven by the same non-blocking event loop as everything else in gumdrop.
Collaboration note: TLS 1.3 comes from Agent15 — also from Kwik's author, Peter Doornbosch, but just the handshake layer, not the connection model. We're currently working together on making PQC — hybrid key exchange and signatures — the default there.
