2 bytes is not enough, usually you'll see whole "size_t" worth of bytes for the length. But you could do something utf-8 inspired I suppose where some bit patt

2 bytes is not enough, usually you'll see whole "size_t" worth of bytes for the length. But you could do something utf-8 inspired I suppose where some bit pattern in the first byte of the length tells you how many bytes are actually used for the length.