Skip to content

Support maximal-length encoded integers #6

Open
@alexcrichton

Description

This came up during rustwasm/walrus#30, specifically rustwasm/walrus#30 (comment).

The use case here is that sometimes when dealing with leb128 you'll often have a scenario where a leb128 integer denotes how many bytes left in the region are part of a section or unit. When encoding, though, we often don't know the length of the section up-front, so a common trick is to do something like:

  • For a u32 encoded as leb128, reserve 5 bytes of space
  • Encode the entire section
  • Encode the length of the section into the previously reserved 5 bytes of space

This encoding uses the maximal instead of minimal width, using "padding zero bytes" that look like 0x80 to ensure that leb128 eats up all 5 of the bytes reserved.

It'd be neat if this crate supported such a use case (it's sort of like Seek with writers), although I'd be fine just supporting it with slices for the time being!

Metadata

Assignees

No one assigned

    Labels

    No labels
    No labels

    Type

    No type

    Projects

    No projects

    Milestone

    No milestone

    Relationships

    None yet

    Development

    No branches or pull requests

    Issue actions