If you use protocol buffers or similar libraries, you get variable-length integers (usually a 7 bits per byte encoding), which have no natural size limit. (You

If you use protocol buffers or similar libraries, you get variable-length integers (usually a 7 bits per byte encoding), which have no natural size limit. (You can go out of your way to get fixed-length integers in protocol buffers, but presumably you'd have a good reason because the default is variable-length.)