Re: "In Hollow, we instead use a compact, fixed-length encoding to represent the data"
That's pretty much what I was thinking. I saw "compact, fixed-length encoding" and my bullshit-o-meter hit a 9.0 and I thought "You mean a big in-memory array, you twat!".
I'm a grey-beard and reserve the right to be a miserable twat in an office full of 20 something graduates that don't know what machine code is.