Fast base64 encoding and decoding
I hate base64. If you have to embed binary data within human-readable text, then you’re either<p>A: doing something horribly wrong<p>B: or forced to use a monkey-patched legacy standard<p>Otherwise just use hexadecimal digits. At least it will be <i>somewhat</i> readable.<p>I know, I know... Base64 encodes 3 bytes on 4 characters, while hex encodes 2 bytes on 4. Big fucking deal. It will almost surely be gzipped down the line, and if you’re storing amounts of data where this would count, then see point “A” above.<p>I hope one day we will laugh at the mere idea of base64 encoding like how we do with EBCDIC or Windows-12XX codepages.