Eh, I was thinking about pretty much exactly what you said. "Length in the data block" would be when length doesn't fit in 32 bits. (I.e. >2GB or maybe >4GB.)

Eh, I was thinking about pretty much exactly what you said. "Length in the data block" would be when length doesn't fit in 32 bits. (I.e. >2GB or maybe >4GB.) It would require an additional branch to test for huge strings, but it will be almost never executed, and I think modern CPUs are pretty good at optimizing out such branches...