Twitter upgraded its private Direct Messaging feature last year to increase the character limit from 140 to 10,000 characters, but CEO Jack Dorsey shared in an interview with NBC’s “Today” show this morning that the same change will not be coming to tweets.

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In the past, however, Dorsey has tweeted screenshots of text walls from Apple’s Notes app to communicate a lengthier message that wouldn’t fit in 140 characters, but text shots present their own problems like lack of being found in search and being easily translated in other languages.

The reason why sysctl feels so cumbersome in Swift is:

• Creating an array of Int32 and passing that by pointer for the first parameter is a nuisance in Swift
• You basically need to call sysctl twice: once with oldp equal to nil to get the size required for the result buffer and then a second time with a properly allocated buffer.
• The result is returned as an untyped buffer of bytes which you then need to interpret correctly.
• There are a few different ways in which failure can occur and we want to reduce these different ways to idiomatic Swift errors or preconditions.

For these reasons, I use a wrapper around sysctl[…]