> we store the records as a single Box<[u8]> containing each record encoded as a 2-byte length prefix followed by its raw bytes.

Interestingly this is exactly how netlink works-ish: https://manpages.ubuntu.com/manpages/focal/man3/netlink.3.ht...

You start, get the type & length, and then that is how many bytes you read.

Some issues with that when you deserialize, from a raw stream in to `[u8; 4096]` buffer, the alignment is only guaranteed to be on 1 byte, not 4 bytes.

In practice it is 4 bytes, but if you run those tests with Miri, you'll get yelled at. So the fix there is to declare the buffer with a type that mandates the alignment of the largest type that you're going to be deserializing.

So then you start your buffer as follows: `[u32; 1024]`, and with `slice::from_raw_parts` you get to turn that into `[u8; 4096]` with the expected alignment.

As an exercise I wrote a streaming parser for netlink, the current existing package serializes everything, all at once.