This post starts off good, but...<p>- The motivation behind this post is storing generated IDs for a site the author is working on. Generated IDs don&#x27;t have the &quot;smaller values are exponentially more likely&quot; property that make varints useful in the first place.<p>- The post rejects UTF-8&#x27;s variable-length encoding because &quot;it can only store numbers up to 1,112,064&quot;. That&#x27;s the maximum number of unicode code points (...ish). The UTF-8 encoding&#x27;s actual limit is &gt;10^16. A much better reason to not use UTF-8&#x27;s encoding is that it was created under pretty heavy backwards-compatibility restrictions that the author doesn&#x27;t have. For example, there&#x27;s no need for being self-synchronizing or to be compatible with Boyer-Moore substring searches.<p>- The post goes with a length-prefixed encoding, but then uses that length prefix as part of the folder structure (it&#x27;s using the generated IDs as filepaths). Which is a great way to create an exponential distribution in the sizes of your directories, instead of the uniform one that was the goal.<p>It&#x27;s not a <i>bad</i> post, there&#x27;s facts in there, but I wouldn&#x27;t recommend bothering with it.