[creationix]

Tha main reason for the reverse encoding is it makes it easier on the writer. You simply do a depth-first traversal of the data graph and emit data on the way back up the stack. Zero buffering is needed since this naturally means you write contents before the length prefix.

But it does open up a future direction I want to make with mutable datasets using append-only persistent data structures. The chain primitive is currently only used for strings, but it will be used to do the equivalent of `{...oldObj, ...newObj}` as a single chain `(pointerToOldObj, newObj)`.

With chains and pointers, you can write new versions of a dataset and reuse all the existing values that are unchanged. This, combined with random-access reads and fixed-block caching makes for a fairly complete MVCC database.