Yup, that's pretty much exactly it. .hex() is a good idea, and probably has a decent chance of beating gzip, assuming .translate() is fast enough. The fastest

Yup, that's pretty much exactly it. .hex() is a good idea, and probably has a decent chance of beating gzip, assuming .translate() is fast enough. The fastest approach for the bitsliced AES impl ended up being pretty cursed: https://github.com/DavidBuchanan314/python-bitsliced-aes/blob/8c91eb3edb4424c641b55deef2433ddaf667eebc/bsaes.py#L46 https://github.com/DavidBuchanan314/python-bitsliced-aes/blo...