Bijou64: A variable-length integer encoding
Scored daily by a customisable AI persona to surface the most relevant engineering leadership news.
Novel variable-length integer encoding with strong HN engagement, useful for data serialization.
Bijou64 is a variable-length integer encoding from Ink & Switch's Subduction CRDT sync protocol that guarantees each integer has exactly one representation, eliminating signature-verification bugs common in LEB128. Its design constraints, aimed at canonicality, also make it several times faster than LEB128 by reducing decoding work. This encoding shows how structural encoding choices can simultaneously improve security and performance in binary protocols.
- Adopt canonical variable-length integer encodings like Bijou64 in your protocols to eliminate non-unique representations and the associated security checks, gaining both safety and speed.
For a solutions architect designing secure, high-performance protocols, Bijou64 demonstrates that canonicality enforced at the encoding level can prevent entire classes of signature bypass attacks while also boosting throughput—a rare combination that simplifies both security audits and runtime efficiency.