alt Hacker NewsYes: but the process would have been exactly the same whether for a hypothetical IPv4+ or the IPng/IPv6 that was decided on; pushing new code to every last corner of the IP universe.
How could it have been otherwise given the original network structures were all of fixed lengths of 32 bits?
The new code would have been vastly simpler. IPv6 is second system syndrome personified.
What we needed was the equivalent of ASCII->UTF8.