Decoding base64 in Python at 10 gigabytes per second
Daniel Lemire introduces fastpybase64, a Python library built on SIMD-accelerated simdutf that provides a drop-in alternative to Python's standard base64 module. In single-threaded benchmarks decoding Base64 data containing line breaks, it achieves over 13 GB/s throughput, approximately 27 times faster than the standard library and four times faster than pybase64.
https://lemire.me/blog/2026/10/17/decoding-base64-in-python-at-10-gigabytes-per-second/
Daniel Lemire introduces fastpybase64, a Python library built on SIMD-accelerated simdutf that provides a drop-in alternative to Python's standard base64 module. In single-threaded benchmarks decoding Base64 data containing line breaks, it achieves over 13 GB/s throughput, approximately 27 times faster than the standard library and four times faster than pybase64.
https://lemire.me/blog/2026/10/17/decoding-base64-in-python-at-10-gigabytes-per-second/
Daniel Lemire's blog
Decoding base64 in Python at 10 gigabytes per second
We sometimes need to convert binary data to text. For example, your emails must be stored as text files. Naïvely, you could just use a string of 0 and 1, but it would mean using one character per bit. We can do better by using 64 ASCII characters: all letters…