Overflow

Ars Technica reports on an integer overflow at YouTube.

We had a similar problem with NewsGator RSS syncing years ago — the unique ID for articles went past 2,147,483,647, and some of our client apps weren’t prepared for it. (The server was fine.)

NetNewsWire was okay, because I was paranoid and treated all the IDs as strings. But that was actually too much paranoia — I really should have saved the space and used integers. But if I had, it’s likely I would have had the same problem. I’m not sure I would have thought to use 64-bit integers.

Now, of course, in any similar circumstance, I use 64-bit integers. (Or at least 53-bit integers.) Lesson learned.