[orangeboats]

Come on... that's the top comment on the thread you shared.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47355046

This article that "begs to differ" is inventing IPv6 all over again. It just refuses to call itself so.

I quote from the top comment:

>So you have to ship new code to every 'network element' to support IPv4x. Just like with IPv6.

and

>So you have to update DNS to create new resource record types [...] Just like with IPv6.

and

>You need to update socket APIs to hold new data structures for longer addresses so your app can tell the kernel to send packets to the new addresses. Just like with IPv6.

[commandersaki]

The key difference, you don't do dual stack, you can incrementally roll it out and get tangible relief, unlike IPv6.

The point is less about the technology proposed, but the point that there could be an interoperable version of a next generation IP and IPv4.

IPv6 did the braindead thing and completely threw out the idea of transition and interoperability for a clean slate. We're paying for it many decades later.

Also, rather than regurgitate a comment, perhaps you should read the article, because that comment misunderstands what is being proposed and thus completely missing the point.

[Dagger2]

Why are you still trying to claim this? v6 has transition methods and ways to interoperate coming out of its wazoo. It does pretty much everything you can do to work with v4. Nobody threw out the idea of transitioning.

> but the point that there could be an interoperable version of a next generation IP and IPv4

Yes, it's IPv6. The thing you linked basically took one of the interoperability methods of v6 and described it in weird terms.

You don't do dual stack with v6 either, unless you want to -- you can do the incremental rollout and tangible relief thing with v6 just fine. (But it turns out most people do want to do dual stack.)

[commandersaki]

Is this some kind of attempt at gaslighting? If IPv6 gave tangible relief, then IPv4 today would not be an important mainstay of the Internet. I recommend you read the article I posted, and see how different things could have been, and how completely botched IPv6 rollout has become, that it is just not taken seriously except by some die hard cultists and mobile/telco (which can be done because they pretty much get full configuration of your networking stack).

I guarantee, we will be having this same exact discussion 10 years from now. And then so on, and so on.

[Dagger2]

Nope, not at all. Everything I said is true. v6 supports deploying in the way described in that article, and you can do it today if you want.

If you don't want to deploy v6 like that, consider why -- because the people who live in the world described by that article will also have the same reasons as you to not deploy it that way.

> If IPv6 gave tangible relief, then IPv4 today would not be an important mainstay of the Internet

No, that argument doesn't hold. v6 can give tangible relief even while v4 is an important mainstay of the Internet. You only have to listen to the people doing CGNAT, or the people turning on v6-mostly and seeing their v4 address use drop by 75% to hear examples of that.

Deployments of v6 reduce the pressure on v4, because they allow us to deploy new networks without needing v4 and because migrating existing networks frees up v4 that can be repurposed. This is also a benefit that's making v4 more viable that it would be without v6.

Plus you're making assumptions about the time needed to replace the Internet's L3 protocol. It's nice to fantasize about finishing it in 10 years, but that doesn't mean that finishing it in 10 years is realistically possible. Deployment of v6 is ongoing and v4's importance is dropping over time; you can't know what the ultimate impact of v6 will be until we're finished deploying it.

There was always going to be a long tail of v4-only hosts, no matter what we did. That's why v6 has a large number of compatibility methods for dealing with them (yes, including the method described in the linked article). It wouldn't be possible to deploy it at all if it didn't.