Re: Proposal: drop QPACK encoder stream framing

[Alan Frindell <[e-mail]>]

    1a. buffer the entire frame, and then iterate though the instructions,
    while checking for every instruction that it does not go beyond the
    end of the frame
    1b. iterate though the instructions as they arrive, while checking
    that the entire instruction is available and that the instruction does
    not go beyond the end of the frame
    
    If we remove framing, the decoder can be implemented as:
    
    2. iterate through the instructions as they arrive, while checking
    that the entire instruction is available

Consider the most complicated instruction, which is Inserting a pure literal (all fields have variable length)

| Name Length | Name | Value Length | Value |

When you know the length of the instruction block in advance, you know that an incomplete instruction is a decoding error which you can check as you decode, and fail immediately on underflow.  Here, you either need to do a trial decode of the variable lengths to see if you have enough bytes, or check while decoding, and decide whether you want to save the state for later or discard it and reparse from the beginning of the instruction.  I'm not even sure reparsing is workable since it might open you up to doing N^2 work -- at least you need to be careful how you implement it.  It's worth calling out that discovering the length of a QPACK varint is more complicated than a QUIC varint.
    
It’s not impossible to solve of course.  “It’s just software” as Dmitri likes to say.  It’s just one piece of complexity I was hoping to avoid.

-Alan