[quicwg/base-drafts] consider making the varint encoding unique (#2299)

Marten Seemann <notifications@github.com> Sun, 06 January 2019 10:58 UTC

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Subject: [quicwg/base-drafts] consider making the varint encoding unique (#2299)
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Our varint encoding has the unpleasant property that it's possible to encode numbers in multiple ways. This leads to rather clumsy language when it comes to the frame encoding:
> The Frame Type field uses a variable length integer encoding (see Section 16) with one exception. To ensure simple and efficient implementations of frame parsing, a frame type MUST use the shortest possible encoding. Though a two-, four- or eight-byte encoding of the frame types defined in this document is possible, the Frame Type field for these frames is encoded on a single byte.

The easy fix for this is to make the varint encoding unique, such that every number can only be encoded in a single way. This is a very straightforward change from what we have today:
The 1-byte numbers would still encode the values from 0 to 63, but the 2-byte numbers would encode the values between 64 and 16,447 (instead of encoding the range between 0 and 16,383), etc.

While a simplification of the spec is the main advantage of this change, it has the nice property that it slightly increases the encoding efficiency.

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