feat(encoding): improve hex conversion performance

[reallesee]

Replace string concatenation in toHex() with Array.from().map().join() pattern for better performance with large arrays. This approach avoids creating intermediate string objects during concatenation, resulting in better memory usage and execution speed, especially when processing large byte arrays

[webmaster128]

Sounds good. I just wonder if we can avoid creating the Array<number> in the first line which would be quite some overhead if not optimized away.

Would it be an option to do something like data.values().map((byte) => ...)? Do you have tests to measure the performance?

[reallesee]

You're right about the Array.from() overhead - thank you.

I could use the spread syntax instead:

export function toHex(data: Uint8Array): string {
  return [...data].map((byte) => byte.toString(16).padStart(2, "0")).join("");
}

Or for maximum efficiency, reduce without intermediate arrays:

export function toHex(data: Uint8Array): string {
  return Array.prototype.reduce.call(
    data, 
    (str, byte) => str + byte.toString(16).padStart(2, "0"), 
    ""
  );
}

I don't have benchmarks yet, but I can run some tests if you'd like to see which approach performs best with different data sizes. What do you think?

[webmaster128]

Getting some benchmarks in place would be very helpful to ensure we don't accidentally slow things down.

[...data] also creates a Array<number>, doesn't it? The reduce implementation creates all those intermediate strings we had before in the str accumulator, so I guess this is not better than the current implementation.