Agreed, most use cases are not this extreme. But I saw them as an "upper bound" on how people would stretch a serialization system. I didn't want to be the guy

Agreed, most use cases are not this extreme. But I saw them as an "upper bound" on how people would stretch a serialization system. I didn't want to be the guy saying "640k should be enough for everyone". No joke, I originally was arguing for 8-bit vtable entries because surely no-one ever needs more than 256 bytes worth of fields. Good thing my co-workers were smarter than me. And yes, FlatBuffers has built-in unions from day 1, which was probably helpful.