CBOR approximates this, since it has several different widths for integers.
> an older message that I can use as the initial message to delta encode/decode from.
General-purpose compression on the encoded stream would do something toward this goal, but some protocol buffers library implementations offer merge functions. The question is what semantics of "merge" you expect. For repeated fields do you want to append or clobber?
CBOR approximates this, since it has several different widths for integers.
> an older message that I can use as the initial message to delta encode/decode from.
General-purpose compression on the encoded stream would do something toward this goal, but some protocol buffers library implementations offer merge functions. The question is what semantics of "merge" you expect. For repeated fields do you want to append or clobber?