I agree that 4 byte overhead in a single item is not a big deal even when the item itself is short. But if you have multiple heterogeneous items, it becomes wor

I agree that 4 byte overhead in a single item is not a big deal even when the item itself is short. But if you have multiple heterogeneous items, it becomes worthwhile to set an upper bound for the relative ratio of overhead over data. (SQLite, for example, makes extensive use of varints for this reason [1].) I personally think a single byte overhead is worthy for sub-100-byte data, while larger ones should use a fixed size prefix because the overhead is no longer significant. [1] https://www.sqlite.org/fileformat.html#record_format https://www.sqlite.org/fileformat.html#record_format