News for hackers. Stuff that matters.

A comment on IPv6 Traffic Crosses the 50% Mark for the First Time. Parent comment

Re:IPv6 Traffic Crosses the 50% Mark for the First Time by bananamogul on Thursday April 16, 2026 @11:50AM (#47795134)
"Is there a reason why adoption has been so abysmally slow?"

Just the obvious one: the people who designed IPv6 didn't design for backwards compatibility.

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:IPv6 Traffic Crosses the 50% Mark for the First Time by jampekka on Thursday April 16, 2026 @01:48PM (#47796988)
> Just the obvious one: the people who designed IPv6 didn't design for backwards compatibility.

Nor for easy transition.

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:IPv6 Traffic Crosses the 50% Mark for the First Time by Dagger2 on Thursday April 16, 2026 @02:33PM (#47797571)
How so? The same working group published e.g. https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc1933, and it's hard to see how v6 could have been designed for backwards compatibility in ways that it wasn't already.

I've asked lots of people to describe a more backwards-compatible design, and generally the best they can manage is to copy the way v6 does things, ending up with the same problems v6 has. This has happened so often that the only reasonable conclusion is that it can't really be done any better than it was.

[ Parent | on HN ]