Fast Forgiving Base64 Decoding with SIMD Instructions

Abstract

On the Internet, we use the Base64 format to represent binary data (e.g., images or cryptographic keys) as text. The ES2026 JavaScript standard, following the WHATWG forgiving-base64 rules, requires decoders to ignore ASCII whitespace while rejecting other non-alphabet characters. Prior SIMD Base64 decoders assume whitespace-free input. We present a block-oriented decoding algorithm that removes whitespace inside the SIMD loop: clean 64-character blocks are decoded directly, while blocks with ignorable characters are compacted into a small stack buffer. We provide implementations for x64 (SSSE3 through AVX-512 VBMI2), ARM NEON, and LoongArch. Our C++ decoder reaches up to 94GB s − 1 on recent AMD Zen 5 processors. In Node.js 25, integration of our decoder raises Uint8Array.fromBase64 throughput by up to 6 × compared with Node.js 19. The implementation has been adopted by major browsers and JavaScript runtimes.