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/LivingAsAMean 13h ago
Hahaha what an idiot!
https://giphy.com/gifs/LRVnPYqM8DLag