IPv6-addresses are represented by 128 bits. This makes it possible to provide far more addresses than IPv4.
However, this also causes problems when working with IPv6. In this case, I am currently working on an IPv6-anonymiation function for rsyslog.
There are some systems that support an unsigned 128 bit integer when using GCC or clang compilers. However, many systems do not support this datatype.
Since rsyslog tries to cater to as many systems as possible, the implementation has to work on all platforms. As such, we have to use two unsigned 64 bit integers instead of one with 128 bits.
The main problem this causes is that this implementation is on software-level as opposed to he hardware-level a 128 bit integer is implemented on. This brings up a conflict of portability vs. speed, since an implementation on software-level is slower than one on hardware-level.
I have decided to make the first implementation as portable as possible, but might also later on try to speed the anonymization up. This might be possible by checking whether the 128 bit integer is supported by the system and if it is using it instead of two 64 bit integers.