A way to deal with the problem? I think this is how the problem was created in the first place: the authors wrote the reference implementation, but then didn't

A way to deal with the problem? I think this is how the problem was created in the first place: the authors wrote the reference implementation, but then didn't test it enough, didn't think of all possible ways things can go wrong. Also, I'm not saying that this necessarily results in bad formats. Eg. I don't particularly like Thrift, but it's kind of OK in the sense that it doesn't do much weird stuff unexpectedly. I don't believe they had any formal way to verify that their plan is going to work, they were "lucky" because they had to work with Protobuf a lot and figured some of its shortfalls before they wrote their own. So, unless you have some sort of a mechanical way to verify that your goals are achieved by the format you are creating, it's going to work just in the same way how any given C program won't corrupt memory: you might get lucky, or after a lot of testing you'll conclude that it's very unlikely that the program will corrupt memory, but you can never be sure. And, really, I don't blame the authors. I'm not saying they were lazy, or didn't pay enough attention. It's just hard to do when you don't have a watchdog who will absolutely not allow any and all transgressions. I wouldn't count on myself to do that w/o such a watchdog -- I don't have that kind of confidence even after implementing many different formats used for similar purpose.