Again, for small integers, this isn't really much of a disadvantage. You can find the terminating byte very efficiently. The bigger issue with varint tends to b

Again, for small integers, this isn't really much of a disadvantage. You can find the terminating byte very efficiently. The bigger issue with varint tends to be more that when you pack data into bytes you have a lot more unaligned memory access. You can work around this, but it increases the complexity of your decoder. Flatbuffers, Cap'nproto, and similar formats can pad everything else for alignment, at the cost of easily compressible nulls. For a lot of use cases, that's a good trade off.