Converge is the prototype exchange format for versioned node. It provides fully featured blobs and versions, including braid finalization, in encrypted and unencrypted flavors. The encoding with atlv is compact and simple to parse and build. And the cryptography is arranged to be compact and efficient.
atlv is a generic binary data encoding that preserves the data’s
leaf-spine structure while providing customizable tags and dictating
minimal semantics.
i realized that the extra byte of subtag in atlv unions was unnecessary and indeed harmful. in particular, it has been pushing me to overload tags when using a union would be natural, because the subtag wouldn’t indicate anything.