It can be considered a variation on LEB128 that packs all of the continuation bits into the first byte. Ie, two leading ones set in the first byte mean that th

It can be considered a variation on LEB128 that packs all of the continuation bits into the first byte. Ie, two leading ones set in the first byte mean that there are two trailing bytes. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11263378 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11263378 is one description. https://github.com/stoklund/varint https://github.com/stoklund/varint has some benchmarks.