[pegasuscollins]

> The only problem that I can see with this is that Son wants to ensure deterministic encoding, but in my example, 0 could be encoded as an integer of any size or signedness.

To be pedantic: Not really. Assuming your example uses twos complement (what else would it use) and you meant "int32" instead of "uint32", negative zero and positive zero would still be the same encoded value. Also since you said "[u]int32", there is only one size the integer can be: 32 bit. So, in your example, the literal value zero has one and only one unique binary representation, which is "0x00000000"

[majewsky]

I implied that a useful serialization format would include integers of multiple size. When your field only needs a uint16, you don't want to pay the extra 6 bytes to encode as, say, uint64.

[pegasuscollins]

You could either stipulate (as you suggested) to always use the smallest width that still fits a number and then prefix with a length byte but that would be wasteful. Ideally something like LEB128 would be used. At any rate, it's not an issue in terms of guaranteeing a bijective mapping.

[majewsky]

Nice, I didn't know about LEB128.