Still odd, I very much doubt they use a 8bit variable to set this limit. What would this bring ?
this post was submitted on 07 Jul 2025
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Numbers guy here, I can confirm 256 is an evenly specific number, and not an oddly specific number.
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Like memory in bits maybe, so 64 128 256 512 1024 2028
Since people are binary like the great Orange says, they have to use a power of 2?
Yep very weird, should have been 255.
No, you can't have a group of zero, so the counter doesn't need to waste a position counting zero.
You probably could, if everyone got banned or something
If you ever create a system where the number of users is "group.members - 1" everywhere in the code, I'd be very disappointed in you and deny that PR.
On another note; I doubt WhatsApp are so concerned with performance they are actually limiting the number of group members by the data type.
But it wouldn't be like that though would it. It would be public group.members() and the u8 would be private.
If all the millions of groups are saved on a central database then making the size a u8 isn't really that weird
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In this case the limit was entirely arbitrary.
The programmers were told to pick a limit and they liked 256. There are issues with having a large number of people in a group, but it wasn't a hardware limit for this particular case.
But it's still not oddly specific, they picked a nice round number