4 ms·
This whole discussion reminds me of the beautiful design of UTF-8. They used the lower bits to be ASCII which made backwards compatibility so much easier. It
by bit_logic 9mo ago
This whole discussion reminds me of the beautiful design of UTF-8. They used the lower bits to be ASCII which made backwards compatibility so much easier. It also reminds me of the failure of Intels Itanium and the success of AMD x64. Engineers often want to abandon backwards compatibility to make a new "beautiful" design, but it's the design that has full backwards compatibility that's actual impressive.
- krupan 9mo agoSo well said! Those are great comparisons.
- x0x0 9mo agoIt reminds me of python 3. Basically, a huge chunk of people (in my case, scientific programming) get an enormous mess and nothing at all of value until... 3.6 maybe (the infix matrix mult operator). Stunningly, people weren't enthused about this deal.
- liquidpele 9mo agoIt would maybe be okay at the router to break some things, but ffs even in software I have to choose? Why do I need both ping and ping6 this is stupid!! They really screwed up by making it a breaking change to the OS and not just internet routing.
- elcritch 9mo agoThe whole ping vs ping6 seems more likely than lazy developers.
- Dagger2 9mo agoThey didn't screw up. They made it a breaking change to OSs because it had to be a breaking change to OSs. If anyone screwed up here, it was the people who made v4, not the ones that made v6. For ping, I think it originally had different binaries because ICMPv4 and ICMPv6 are different protocols, but Linux has had a dual-stack `ping` binary for a very long time now. You can just use `ping` for either address family.