3 ms·
If you add new bits to v4 you invent an incompatible protocol, and you should add a lot of bits so you'll never have to invent another incompatible protocol aga
by pocksuppet 6mo ago
If you add new bits to v4 you invent an incompatible protocol, and you should add a lot of bits so you'll never have to invent another incompatible protocol again. You can also fix the minor annoyances in v4.
- bombcar 6mo agoFlexible! The first byte tells you how many bytes of addressing you have. Perfect and future proof!
- jasomill 6mo agoAt best future-resistant. True future-proofing would require representing address length as an arbitrary-precision nonzero unsigned integer. Since allowing a zero-length network address format would serve no purpose other than to pointlessly complicate standards definitions, you could trivially and without loss of generality interpret zero to denote some extended-length address length representation to be defined in a future version of the standard.
- tremon 6mo agoHardware implementations typically do not like variable-size fields. Not just because the total header size becomes unpredictable, but because it means any following fields no longer have a fixed offset, and that complicates parsing.