bytes.fromhex() is 1.3 times slower than binascii.a2b_hex()

Bug report

Bug description:

I was looking at modernising some old code that uses binascii.a2b_hex, and I was surprised to find that bytes.fromhex() is a lot slower:

>>> timeit.timeit('bytes.fromhex("abcd1234abcd1234")', number=10000000)
1.0542256180197
>>> timeit.timeit('binascii.a2b_hex("abcd1234abcd1234")', 'import binascii', number=10000000)
0.4072963949292898

I thought maybe it was a difference in the lookup of the bytes classmethod vs the module lookup. It appears that it is, to some extent, but not completely:

>>> timeit.timeit('fromhex("abcd1234abcd1234")', 'fromhex=bytes.fromhex', number=10000000)
0.6133267850382254
>>> timeit.timeit('a2b_hex("abcd1234abcd1234")', 'from binascii import a2b_hex', number=10000000)
0.3788172130007297

Of course, all these times are extremely small, so it probably does not matter in most situations, but still, I found it surprising.

CPython versions tested on:

3.13

Operating systems tested on:

Linux

Commencez par reproduire sous CPython 3.13/Linux les comparaisons timeit de bytes.fromhex() et binascii.a2b_hex() présentées dans l’issue, puis suivez les deux points d’entrée nommés pour comprendre l’origine de la différence. Un résultat utile déterminerait s’il est possible de rendre bytes.fromhex() plus rapide et validerait toute modification avec des benchmarks équivalents et les tests pertinents.