> Unpopular opinion warning: contrast the success of HTTP/2 with the failure of IPv6 to maintain backward compatibility at the API level - which hampered its ability to be seamlessly employed in applications.
Unpopular?
The gratuitous breaking of backwards compatibility by IPv6, inflicting staggering inefficiencies felt directly or indirectly by all internet users, should be a canonical case study by now. It should be taught to all engineering students as a cautionary tale: never, ever do this.
I would like to read about a better design that should be implemented instead - can you share some links? I cannot imagine how compatibility can be achieved given that address fields in IPv4 are fixed 32-bit.
I strongly believe IPv6 would be more fully deployed if they had only extended the address fields, and left everything else the same.
Things like Neighbor Discovery Protocol don't have to exist; ARP would work fine; the protocol already contemplates different length addresses, it would just need a constant assigned for IPv6.
i'm fairly sympathetic here - except part of the blame should really be on the socket layer and resolver interface. if they had been a bit better at modelling multiprotocol networks, this kind of transition would have been easier.
Unpopular?
The gratuitous breaking of backwards compatibility by IPv6, inflicting staggering inefficiencies felt directly or indirectly by all internet users, should be a canonical case study by now. It should be taught to all engineering students as a cautionary tale: never, ever do this.