this post was submitted on 07 Jul 2025
1430 points (99.1% liked)
Microblog Memes
8455 readers
2206 users here now
A place to share screenshots of Microblog posts, whether from Mastodon, tumblr, ~~Twitter~~ X, KBin, Threads or elsewhere.
Created as an evolution of White People Twitter and other tweet-capture subreddits.
Rules:
- Please put at least one word relevant to the post in the post title.
- Be nice.
- No advertising, brand promotion or guerilla marketing.
- Posters are encouraged to link to the toot or tweet etc in the description of posts.
Related communities:
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Well, no. They are not certainly using
int, they might be using a more efficient data type.This might be for legacy reasons or it might be intentional because it might actually matter a lot. If I make up an example,
chat_participant_idis definitely stored with each message and probably also in some index, so you can search the messages. Multiply this over all chats on WhatsApp, even the ones with only two people in, and the difference betweenu8andu16might matter a lot.But I understand how a TypeScript or Java dev could think that the difference between 1 and 4 bytes is negligible.
Probably why I said "almost certainly". And I stand by that. We're not talking about
chat_participant_id, we're talking aboutGROUP_CHAT_LIMIT, probably a constant somewhere. And we're talking about a value that would require a 9-bit unsigned int to store it, at a minimum (and therefore at least a 16-bit integer in sizes that actually exist for types). Unless it's 8-bit and interprets a 0 as 256, which is highly unorthodox and would require bespoke coding basically all over instead of a basicnum <= GROUP_CHAT_LIMIT.I think you're just very confused friend, or misunderstanding how binary counting works, because why in the 9 hells would they be using 9 bits (512 possible values) to store 8 bits (256 possible members) of data?
I think you're confusing indexing (0-255) with counting (0-256), and mistakenly including a negation state (counting 0, which would be a null state for the variable) in your conception of the process. Because yes, index 255 is in fact count 256 and 0 would actually be 1. Index = count -1
I'm imagining something like this:
If
GROUP_CHAT_LIMITis 8 bits, this does not work.So add a +1 like you would for any index to count comparison?
I guess I'm failing to see how this doesn't work as long as you properly handle the comparison logic. Maybe you can explain how this doesn't work...