There's a marshalling analog to Greenspun's Tenth Rule. Every sufficiently complicated serialization implementation contains an ad hoc, informally-specified, b

There's a marshalling analog to Greenspun's Tenth Rule. Every sufficiently complicated serialization implementation contains an ad hoc, informally-specified, bug-ridden, slow implementation of half of ASN.1. I'd add that this is true of most ASN.1 implementations as well. The length encoding is a solved problem in ASN.1 (just use CER).