Specifically in the case of string length encodings, these objections don't seem to apply. The memory fetch is from a cache line that is already needed for the

Specifically in the case of string length encodings, these objections don't seem to apply. The memory fetch is from a cache line that is already needed for the (beginning of the) string data, so only adds ops in the case of pure substring access (in which case C patterns of holding offset/length out of band apply). Similarly you're going to be accessing a string -- unaligned reads are the least of your problem if you're doing byte-at-a-time ops; and you can always align the string to a word boundary to get the varint to start at a word boundary. I totally agree that as a general tool, varints have failures. But for (a) encoding pascal-style string lengths; (b) encoding often-small numbers on the wire; and (c) encoding codepoints they seem to apply fine.