ITT: People who have never done low level networking.
Edit: Without some absolutely crazy hacks, the smallest amount of data you can really transfer or compute on is one byte. 256 requires one byte, 257 requires you to DOUBLE the data used to 2 bytes. Multiply this by whatever data they send and the problem remains the same.
This is the kind of thing that comes up a lot designing custom protocols.
Jup, lots of people are talking 64-bit architecture and RAM optimization, whereas the number in question most likely is related to IPv4 packets, which were made for (and to my knowledge still use) octets/8-bit blocks.
ITT: People who have never done low level networking.
Edit: Without some absolutely crazy hacks, the smallest amount of data you can really transfer or compute on is one byte. 256 requires one byte, 257 requires you to DOUBLE the data used to 2 bytes. Multiply this by whatever data they send and the problem remains the same.
This is the kind of thing that comes up a lot designing custom protocols.
Jup, lots of people are talking 64-bit architecture and RAM optimization, whereas the number in question most likely is related to IPv4 packets, which were made for (and to my knowledge still use) octets/8-bit blocks.
My experience is that a limit of 256 means they probably are willing to allocate up to 24 bits to send the value over the network:
0x323536
People seem to love to pass around their numbers as JSON or similar.