On: Twitter IDs to roll past 53 bits in a couple days (may break javascript apps)

[ars]

For those wondering where 53 bits comes from, it's the size of the mantissa (significand, fraction) in a 64bit IEEE float.

You can use 64bit floats (double) to store exact integers up to 53 bits.

This works in a lot of languages on non 64bit hardware, php for example.