How many other examples like this have occurred throughout computing history?
Plenty, Twitter for example.
Chess.com stopped working on 32bit iPads because 2^31 games have been played
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Re: Chess.com stopped working on 32bit iPads because 2^31 games have been played
#12Real world example of why Apple is killing 32 bit apps on iOS.
This is simply because they're taking an integer from their database as an auto incrementing ID and converting it directly into a native integer on the iOS device thus breaking it. They could work around this any number of ways.
It's a pretty lame bug, to be honest and certainly something easily foreseeable as this wasn't an overnight occurrence.
Re: Chess.com stopped working on 32bit iPads because 2^31 games have been played
#13were they ever expecting negative number of games? why signed integer?
Because signed is default for some reason in most languages, and most developers aren't taught to think critically about how decisions like simple datatypes might affect scalability.
Re: Chess.com stopped working on 32bit iPads because 2^31 games have been played
#14How many other examples like this have occurred throughout computing history?
IIRC at least slashdot and twitter had to do some non trivial database migrations because they hit maximum value of some ID field.
Re: Chess.com stopped working on 32bit iPads because 2^31 games have been played
#15How many other examples like this have occurred throughout computing history?
Well, famously youtube's views counter overflow from Gangnam Style...
Re: Chess.com stopped working on 32bit iPads because 2^31 games have been played
#16It's fascinating... the Y2K problem never came to fruition because - arguably - of the immense effort put in behind the scenes by people who understood what might have happened if they hadn't. The end result has been that the entire class of problems is overlooked, because people see it as having been a fuss over nothing.
I sometimes think it would've been better if a few things had visibly failed in January 2000.
Re: Chess.com stopped working on 32bit iPads because 2^31 games have been played
#17were they ever expecting negative number of games? why signed integer?
Also note that some languages like Java do not even support unsigned integers.
Re: Chess.com stopped working on 32bit iPads because 2^31 games have been played
#18were they ever expecting negative number of games? why signed integer?
Because signed is default for some reason in most languages, and most developers aren't taught to think critically about how decisions like simple datatypes might affect scalability.
Not just the default, it doesn't even exist in some languages.
Re: Chess.com stopped working on 32bit iPads because 2^31 games have been played
#19Real world example of why Apple is killing 32 bit apps on iOS.
This has nothing to do with CPU architecture.
It's a little related. The languages typically used for iOS programming encourage the use of data types whose size matches the CPU architecture's bitness. Thus, careless programmers will end up using 32-bit integer types on 32-bit devices, and 64-bit types on 64-bit devices.
I really doubt this is in any way linked to Apple's reasons for dropping 32-bit, though.
Re: Chess.com stopped working on 32bit iPads because 2^31 games have been played
#20Reminds me of the havoc that was caused when Twitter tweet IDs rolled over. Resulting in every third party developer to update their apps (and at the time there were a lot of those).
Twitter saw it coming and forced the issue. By saying that at a certain date and time they would manually jump the ID numbers rather than wait for it to happen at some unpredictable time.