  Web developers use base64 formats to include images, fonts, sounds and other
resources directly inside HTML, JavaScript, JSON and XML files. We estimate
that billions of base64 messages are decoded every day. We are motivated to
improve the efficiency of base64 encoding and decoding. Compared to
state-of-the-art implementations, we multiply the speeds of both the encoding
(~10x) and the decoding (~7x). We achieve these good results by using the
single-instruction-multiple-data (SIMD) instructions available on recent Intel
processors (AVX2). Our accelerated software abides by the specification and
reports errors when encountering characters outside of the base64 set. It is
available online as free software under a liberal license.
