Both the example libraries compared (tokenizers and tiktoken) are Rust-based with Python bindings. There's just a few levers in Rust that can speed it up even more particularly with LLM assistance as the AI Use Discloure here notes:

> Final profiling stages and the last ~4x worth of performance from eliminating branching and improving the pretoken cache hierarchy

1 year ago everyone would have called you insane for suggesting this. Now we all shrug and say yeah maybe we can do this and it’s actually a good idea?

We should rewrite all Rust code in Python. Not for any technical reason. I'm just sick of the Rust cult at this point.