Compact serialization for variable-length integers Variable-length integers: bytes are a MSB base-128 encoding of the number. The high bit in each byte signifies whether another digit follows. To make the encoding is one-to-one, one is subtracted from all but the last digit. Thus, the byte sequence a[] with length len, where all but the last byte has bit 128 set, encodes the number: (a[len-1] & 0x7F) + sum(i=1..len-1, 128^i*((a[len-i-1] & 0x7F)+1)) Properties: * Very small (0-127: 1 byte, 128-16511: 2 bytes, 16512-2113663: 3 bytes) * Every integer has exactly one encoding * Encoding does not depend on size of original integer type