On 2021-08-04 15:37:36 -0400, Robert Haas wrote:
> On Wed, Aug 4, 2021 at 3:01 PM Andres Freund <andres@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 :)