> indexes are LEB128s

This article is promoting how fast WebAssembly is to parse (and no doubt it is faster than JS), and yet LEB128 is a slower-to-parse representation than "prefix varint" with the same cost in bits [1][2]. It seems the designers didn't actually care what was faster. [3]

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11263378 [2] https://github.com/stoklund/varint [3] https://github.com/WebAssembly/design/issues/601