I implemented Base 64 encoding and decoding in several different languages. Base 64 Encoding is a way to represent arbitrary data in strings whose characters fall within a 64-length (+1 for padding) subset of ASCII characters. These aren't meant to be as fast as the standard bitshifting by multiples of 6 algorithm, but rather to compare the relative performace of different languages using my encode/decode algorithm implemented in (mostly) the same way (the bitwise operations are identical for all languages).
The encode and decode functions divide the input and output data into chunks and use bitwise operations to transform them appropriately. I performed a benchmark for each language in which a large 'Lorem Ipsum' paragraph is encoded then decoded one million times. The test was run five times and the fastest was selected. For slower languages, the time was extrapolated.
| Language | Time (s) | Comments | Encoding Struct | Decoding Struct |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| C | 1.078 | Compiled with gcc -O3 | char * | char * |
| Java | 3.173 | Ran in Eclipse, Java 8 | StringBuffer | ByteBuffer |
| Go | 3.374 | Go version go1.12.9 | strings.Builder | bytes.Buffer |
| C# | 4.585 | Ran in VS 2015, .NET 4.6 | StringBuilder | byte[] |
| Nim | 5.264 | Compiled with nim c -d:release | string | string |
| Python | 15.52 | Ran with PyPy3 (JIT) | List | bytearray |
| Crystal | 20.28 | Compiled with crystal build --release | String | UInt8[] |
| Javascript | 22.04 | Ran with Node.js v10 | String | Buffer |
| Elixir | 28.60 | Used Task.async_stream | bitstring | bitstring |
| Python | 355.3 | Ran with Python3 (standard) | List | bytearray |