Length could be encoded differently, as a varint. As long as the highest bit is set, the next byte is also part of the length - just left-shift the result so fa

Length could be encoded differently, as a varint. As long as the highest bit is set, the next byte is also part of the length - just left-shift the result so far by seven and add the 7 lower bits, as soon as the highest bit is 0 we have the final length. The processing overhead is low, 127 bytes only cost 1... Not such a big issue.