Well you could easily use the first 4 bits to indicate how many bytes the length is + 1. c0 (0b0000) -> length is 0xc = 12 1341 (0b0001) -> length is

Well you could easily use the first 4 bits to indicate how many bytes the length is + 1. c0 (0b0000) -> length is 0xc = 12 1341 (0b0001) -> length is 0x134 = 69,940 239a42 (0b0010) -> length is 0x239a42 = 145,828 deadbeaf239a47 (0b0111) -> length is 0xdeadbeaf239a4 = 3917404957718948. This gets you a 7-byte = 56bit number, minimal overhead for smaller strings. Maybe reserve 0x1111 for future use. Maybe the other endian makes more sense here, and maybe 0 should mean zero-length. It's probably not very performant compared to other solutions, but you can just shift 4 bits, and you're done I'm curious how many strings are allocated at a particular point in time (across everything, kernel, os, apps, etc)