[vintermann]

The author mentions that this is for a variable length (i.e. bigint) format. Sure, I bet mature bigint libraries do stuff like this automatically when sensible, but I still think it's interesting to read about someone figuring out such things on their own.

[bonzini]

It's about variable-length encodings, not variable length integers.

[cormacrelf]

Yeah. The (63-nlz)/7 is part of a piece of code implementing an encoding. nlz is an int.