> we started looking at this protobuf library he had selected, and sure enough, the author decided it was a good idea to prepend the message with the message length encoded as a varint.

> WHY? Oh, why?!

> And yes, it turns out that other people have noticed this anomaly. It's screwed up encoding and decoding in their projects, unsurprisingly. We found a (still-open) bug report from 2018, among others

If anyone knows which library/language these issues the author is talking about are in, please tell us. I'd like to avoid that library if possible