[HansHamster]

It feels a bit unfair to say that it is faster by being able to tell the total length from the first byte and capping it at 64 bit, while some of the other formats can store arbitrarily large integers. I guess you could use another variable length encoding for the prefix at the cost of some performance and using even more space...

[petermcneeley]

esp when the number is capped at only 64 bits which is quite small for some bigInt style numbers.