This is my own take for exotic base encodings like Base32, Base58 and Base85.
I started to write it in 2013 as coding practice and kept it as a small pet
project. I suggest anyone who wants to brush up their coding skills to give
those encoding problems a shot. They turned out to be more challenging than I
expected. To grasp the algorithms I had to get a pen and paper to see how the
math worked.
Features
Multibase support. All formats
covered by SimpleBase including a few Base64 variants are supported. Base2, Base8, and Base10 are also supported.
Base32: RFC 4648, BECH32, Crockford, z-base-32, Geohash, FileCoin and Extended Hex
(BASE32-HEX) flavors with Crockford character substitution, or any other
custom flavors.
Base36: Both lowercase and uppercase alphabets are supported.
Base45: RFC 9285 is supported.
Base58: All the standard (Bitcoin (BTC), Ripple (XRP), Monero (XMR)) and custom Base58 encoding methods are supported. Also provides Base58Check and Avalanche (AVAX) CB58 encoding/decoding helpers.
Base62: The standard Base62 encoding/decoding supported along with a custom alphabet.
Base85: Ascii85, Z85 and custom flavors. IPv6 encoding/decoding support.
Base16: UpperCase, LowerCase and ModHex flavors. An experimental hexadecimal
encoder/decoder just to see how far I can take the optimizations compared to .NET's
implementations. It's quite fast now, but .NET has method since .NET 5.
This is mostly a baseline implementation now (except for when you need ModHex).
The basic usage for encoding a buffer into, say, Base32, is as simple as:
using SimpleBase;
byte[] myBuffer;
string result = Base32.Crockford.Encode(myBuffer, padding: true);
// you can also use "ExtendedHex" or "Rfc4648" as encoder flavors
Decoding is also similar:
using SimpleBase;
string myText = ...
byte[] result = Base32.Crockford.Decode(myText);
See the wiki for more types of examples and full documentation.
Benchmark Results
Small buffer sizes are used (64 characters). They are closer to real life
applications. Base58 performs really bad in decoding of larger buffer sizes,
due to polynomial complexity of numeric base conversions.
Decoding (80 character string, except Base45 which must use an 81 character string)
Method
Mean
Error
StdDev
Gen0
Gen1
Allocated
DotNet_Base64
102.24 ns
0.234 ns
0.219 ns
0.0052
-
88 B
Base2_Default
102.95 ns
0.074 ns
0.070 ns
0.0024
-
40 B
Base8_Default
103.41 ns
0.199 ns
0.176 ns
0.0024
-
40 B
Base16_UpperCase
50.60 ns
0.931 ns
0.777 ns
0.0038
-
64 B
Base16_UpperCase_TextReader
275.90 ns
2.852 ns
2.381 ns
0.5007
0.0153
8376 B
Multibase_Base16_UpperCase
51.73 ns
0.254 ns
0.238 ns
0.0038
-
64 B
Multibase_TryDecode_Base16_UpperCase
46.95 ns
0.265 ns
0.235 ns
-
-
-
Base32_Crockford
126.78 ns
1.751 ns
1.552 ns
0.0048
-
80 B
Base36_LowerCase
4,160.01 ns
65.532 ns
54.722 ns
-
-
80 B
Base45_Default
73.56 ns
1.248 ns
1.167 ns
0.0048
-
80 B
Base58_Bitcoin
4,544.46 ns
89.449 ns
133.882 ns
-
-
88 B
Base58_Monero
107.88 ns
0.408 ns
0.341 ns
0.0052
-
88 B
Base62_Default
4,500.24 ns
7.457 ns
6.610 ns
-
-
88 B
Base85_Z85
256.92 ns
0.580 ns
0.514 ns
0.0052
-
88 B
Base256Emoji_Default
287.68 ns
1.634 ns
1.528 ns
0.0062
-
104 B
Notes
I'm sure there are areas for improvement. I didn't want to go further in
optimizations which would hurt readability and extensibility. I might
experiment on them in the future.
Test suite for Base32 isn't complete, I took most of it from RFC4648. Base58
really lacks a good spec or test vectors needed. I had to resort to using
online converters to generate preliminary test vectors.
Base85 tests are also makseshift tests based on what output
Cryptii produces. Contribution to missing test cases
are greatly appreciated.
It's interesting that I wasn't able to reach .NET Base64's performance with
Base16 with a straightforward managed code despite that it's much simpler. I
was only able to match it after I converted Base16 to unsafe code with good
independent interleaving so CPU pipeline optimizations could take place.
Still not satisfied though. Is .NET's Base64 implementation native? Perhaps.
Thanks
Thanks to all contributors who
provided patches, and reported bugs.
Chatting about this pet project with my friends
@detaybey,
@vhallac,
@alkimake and
@Utopians at one of our friend's birthday
encouraged me to finish this. Thanks guys.
