Isn't there an easy solution for this? A varint representation does not mandate that you use its variable length. Just pad with leading zeros and you have a fix

Isn't there an easy solution for this? A varint representation does not mandate that you use its variable length. Just pad with leading zeros and you have a fixed length. If I understand the varint format right, its groups of 7 bits, stuffed into one byte each. Alright, so let's just always use 4 bytes, which gives you a value range from 0 to 2^28-1 for the length, that's up to 256M which should suffice if you are that concerned about telemetry speed. Now your length field is always 4 bytes. Even if you could shrink it to 1 or 2 most of the time, but since you care more about encoding speed than size on the wire that should be fine. Nothing forces you to encode value 42 in 1 byte. Just use 4. Am I missing something? Honest question.