[acdha]

Yes, but consider how much volume there is in the stock market - doubling to a 64-bit integer would increase RAM and network volume, and there are plenty of downstream consumers who’d need to test this. None of that is intractable but there’s literally one company affected - the next highest share price is two orders of magnitude lower - so there must be a strong temptation to see what Buffett would want to do a split.

[andylynch]

It's slightly mystifying they haven't done one already (and yes I know he wants people to buy and hold). This share is very... special in causing these problems and I'm actually surprised NYSE didn't make them do it some time ago.

[Nasrudith]

Technically they can also use variable length integers or even "BigIntegers" but they process slower.

[acdha]

Yes - I said 64-bit because that’s a natural size now and for high volume like this it seems likely that they’d prefer a fixed size to savings which make decode and recovery logic harder and less cache line efficient.

[jfk13]

> the next highest share price is two orders of magnitude lower

Two orders of magnitude isn't really very much headroom.

[compiler-guy]

In this domain it is quite a bit of headroom. Normal companies just avoid the problem by splitting before they get even within two orders of magnitude.

So if this next-closest share price got closer to the limit, it would almost certainly split long before it became within one order of magnitude of the limit.

BH is just a different duck that way.

[andylynch]

Normally issuers would just split the stock. When investors' systems break because your quote is 100x anyone else's you're just making everyone's job harder.