Re: Payload length 0

[Martin Thomson <[e-mail]>]

Having just implemented this (and gotten it wrong once), I don't want more
special cases.  Both of these options need extra code.  As Kazuho points
out, filling in a two octet length is trivial.

It's true that a length of 0 is invalid, but so is 1 through 16.

Yes, this saves an octet, on about 4 packets per connection in the common
case, more like 2 if you actually take advantage of compound packets.
On Fri, May 18, 2018 at 3:08 PM Marten Seemann <[e-mail]>
wrote:

> Jana asked me to raise this issue on the list, after we already had a bit
of discussion in https://github.com/quicwg/base-drafts/pull/1301.

> The proposal is to make a payload length of 0 a special value, indicating
that the packet is not a coalesced packet, i.e. that the whole payload of
the UDP packet is the QUIC packet. This would eliminate an invalid value of
the payload length (there are no empty packets), save one byte for packet
lengths where varint encoding would result in a two byte number, and
apparently also simplify (some) implementations.

> Kazuho argued creating two versions of each Long Header type (one with
and one without a payload length) is the better solution, since all values
below the AEAD tag length + 1 are invalid values anyway, and it would save
one more byte.

> We should make a decision if and what we want to do about this.