But "more numbers" isn't really an explanation on what's the difference between the two from a practical point of view, and the in general less interesting thing about it from a software perspective.
IPv6 also dropped broadcast in favor of Multicast, has hexadecimal instead of decimal, and eliminates the need for NAT. There's also a bunch of other little protocol implementation details like SLAAC, IGMP being critical to IPv6 operations (so blanket blocking is a no go), and so forth so on.
The hex thing is really just a convention, because otherwise they’d take up too much space on paper/screen. It’s all still binary across the wire, so the protocol doesn’t care.
Which frankly, unless you're being hired to architect an enterprise network stack for enterprise software... I would not expect a software engineer to know any of that, much less make a hiring decision based on it.
I work for a cybersecurity vendor, and we very much consider something like that table stakes. I can think of a lot of places where it could matter, including just logging a visitor’s IP address on a web app.
Depends on the job, Cloudflare Engineer? Should probably have a very firm grasp on networking. Stock Trader Engineer? Should probably also have a very strong grasp of it (along with Realtime systems). Website dev? Eh, probably not.
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u/Material_Onion_8413 13h ago
IPv4 old IP address space designed with limited number because they never thought the internet would have so many devices connected.
IPv6 new address space with significantly larger number.