Why variable-length integers?The basic goal of a variable-length integer encoding is to allow small numbers to be encoded in fewer bytes than larger numbers. Among other uses, they're popular for TLV formats such as Protocol Buffers, which contain lots of small numbers (tags) and have a design goal of space efficiency. The two encodings with near-universal adoption are VLQ and LEB128, which are the big- and little-endian dialects of an encoding originally developed in the early 1980s[0].Due to v...