Christoph and I have more or less finished some work that updates Pd's networking and also fixes some  bugs and a couple pain points:

 

* IPv6 support

* multicast

* netsend: optional from hostname & port outlet

* netsend: connectionless UDP, no more connection refused (fire & forget without having to manually reconnect)

* netreceive: settable timeout which defaults to 10 seconds (no more super-long frozen Pd)

* improved error printing with netsend and netrceive Find Last Error support

* various small bug fixes (no more polling errors after socket is closed)

 

The pdsend & pdreceive utils are similarly updated.

 

The discussion & pull request on Github: https://github.com/pure-data/pure-data/pull/577

 

If you can build Pd and want to try this out, the branch is called feature/netobject-updates

 

The overall approach taken is to keep IPv4 as default and detect IPv6 addresses so this should not affect existing patches. The IP version handling should also degrade gracefully based if IPv6 is not available. An added bonus is hostnames now resolve (ie. google.com) and you can also listen on a hostname if your system can grab it (ie. computername.local).

 

One current limitation is that Tcl 8.5 does not have IPv6 support, so the core communication with the GUI remains IPv4.