On 2021-08-04 15:37:36 -0400, Robert Haas wrote: > On Wed, Aug 4, 2021 at 3:01 PM Andres Freund <and...@anarazel.de> wrote: > > Extending that to arbitrary lengths obviously at some point makes the > > encoding > > in unary wasteful, and the benefit of few branches vanishes. So what I was > > thinking is that for variable length pieces of data that are not limited to > > 8 > > bytes, we could replace the '8 0 bits' special case with a new special case: > > The length in bytes follows as a max-8-byte varint. > > But what if I have a machine with more than 16 exabytes of RAM and I > want to use all of its memory to store one really big integer?
Then the embedded 8 byte length value would just have to do the same thing recursively to store that huge length header :)
