# RFC conformance

libcbor is, generally speaking, very faithful implementation of RFC 7049. There are, however, some limitations imposed by technical constraints.

## Bytestring length

There is no explicit limitation of indefinite length byte strings. [1] libcbor will not handle byte strings with more chunks than the maximum value of `size_t`. On any sane platform, such string would not fit in the memory anyway. It is, however, possible to process arbitrarily long strings and byte strings using the streaming decoder.

[1]

https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc7049#section-2.2.2

## “Half-precision” IEEE 754 floats

As of C99 and even C11, there is no standard implementation for 2 bytes floats. libcbor packs them as a float <https://en.cppreference.com/w/c/language/type>. When encoding, libcbor selects the appropriate wire representation based on metadata and the actual value. This applies both to canonical and normal mode.

For more information on half-float serialization, please refer to the section on Half floats.