64 Bit User IDs at Facebook

Considering its rising growth in the future years Facebook has decided to make vital changes. One of them is the recent announcements made at Facebook Developers by Dave Morin. It is about the usage of 64 bit object IDs instead of the currently used 32bits which provide storage problems. Essentially the idea behind this move is to handle large numbers for future situations.

The recent decision is expected to be implement during inital Novemeber and it is hoped that it would make life easy for budding developers.

Slashdot’s take on the entire new story is quite interesting. Despite having only 47 million users currently, Facebook’s decision to support 64 bits will enable it to have more than 18 quintillion (18,446,744,074,000,000,000) user accounts. Well, this is huge keep in mind the current population of world i.e. about 6.5 billion people.

Perhaps, Facebook is setting its sights beyond Earth or just trying to avoid what happened when Slashdot ran out of space for comment IDs last year.

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