Version 5 of the native protocol for CQL [1] adds the `vint` and `unsigned vint`
types.
An unsigned integer encoded as a `vint` has a variable size based on the
magnitude of the value. The first byte indicates the total number of bytes.
For signed integers, a "zig-zag" encoding scheme ensures that small negative
values are encoded as short-length `vint`s (0 -> 0, -1 -> 1, 1 -> 2, 2 -> 3, -2
-> 4, etc).
[1] https://github.com/apache/cassandra/blob/trunk/doc/native_protocol_v5.spec
