3 ms·
I've had this question for some time, and you mentioned that you were present during the debate phase. I wonder if I could ask if there was any mention of a so
by joquarky 8y ago
I've had this question for some time, and you mentioned that you were present during the debate phase.
I wonder if I could ask if there was any mention of a solution to expand IP address space in a manner similar to how UTF-8 expands as needed?
I'm not a SME on low-level protocols, but it seems the jump from 32 to 128 bits was an ambitious leap to future-proof and maybe a small part of the reason adoption is slowed.
- grandinj 8y agoI don't remember any variable-length encodings being proposed, but it was a long time ago. I don't think the 128-bit length was ever an issue, that is just a field length, one parameter amongst many. It's all the other details that make a protocol (and it's surrounding infrastructure) more or less difficult to implement. One of the contending proposals literally modified an existing TCP/IP stack with a constant in all the relevant places, and was then compiled twice. It had #ifdef IPV6 #define ADDR_LENGTH 4 #else #define ADDR_LENGTH 16 #endif and then you could compile the same source twice, once for each protocol, just passing a -DIP6 on the command line for the IPV6 version.