5 ms·
The funny thing is Telegram just ran in to the issue where the 32bit user id column was about to overflow but overnight it went from 32bit to 64bit. No decades
by SilverRed 6y ago
The funny thing is Telegram just ran in to the issue where the 32bit user id column was about to overflow but overnight it went from 32bit to 64bit. No decades of waiting and hacks. Just goes to show how hard it is to make any kind of change without a central authority.
- munk-a 6y agoThat is a very, very different situation - it's highly likely that the values from that column are generally being read out into numeric-ish typed variables that default to using 64 bits of storage anyways. Additionally, they can actually see and potentially review all of the code using that value and adjust it as necessary. The central authority doesn't hurt but this is really an apples to elephants comparison.
- astrea 6y agoOne is global infrastructure with billions of users to appease making a potentially breaking change that the end user directly sees. The other is an app used by a order of magnitude less users simply changing int to int64 in their code and rolling over some databases.
- topranks 6y agoYeah. It’d never be as easy to convert a decentralised system like the internet to a new protocol. That said, simply increasing the IP address field size in the header would have been a lot simpler and been easy to upgrade. A big part of the IPv6 story is how they made so many changes there is a relatively steep learning curve to adopt. And NAT etc gave us another way not to.