Re: sockets APIs extensions for Host Identity Protocol

[Miika Komu <[e-mail]>]

On Mon, 7 May 2007, Stephane Bortzmeyer wrote:

Hi Stephane and thanks for your comments,

> On Fri, May 04, 2007 at 06:28:30PM +0300,
> Miika Komu <[e-mail]> wrote
> a message of 27 lines which said:
>
>> One could conceive that such a level of indirection could be used
>> more generally outside of HIP, to enable applications to be more
>> compatible across IP versions, for instance.
>
> One important thing: this is only for the C programming language. In
> most (all?) other languages, programmers no longer handle directly IP
> addresses and thus are shielded from things like IPv4 vs. IPv6 or
> addresses vs. handles.

Yes, that is true.

>> This latter observation makes me wonder whether there have been such
>> considerations previously in the applications area?
>
> The big advice should be: use a high-level language (or, in C, a
> high-level library, like Neon - http://www.webdav.org/neon/ - or cURL
> - http://curl.haxx.se/) and you're safe from the changes in IETF
> fashions.

The higher-level languages are always based on the C-language sockets API. 
Would it make sense to make the modification to a single place (sockets 
API) rather than all of the present programming language implementations? 
The latter is, of course, better than modifying all applications.

-- 
Miika Komu                                       http://www.iki.fi/miika/