[drudru]

Came here to say the same thing. When I first saw the protobuf zigzag encoding, I saw the same pattern. At first, I thought I must be wrong because they aren't describing it this way. Nope, it really is that simple.

In earlier computer systems (pre 1980s), this kind of variety was more common. In my career, I have only been exposed to twos-complement or float formats. I would bet that this is true for many other engineers as well.

I'm glad the protobuf folks used it. I'm also glad Dr. Lemire wrote an article about it. It is another clever trick to have in the toolbox.