Chore: Replace Hex Encoding/Decoding

[ASuciuX]

Description

I took a look at the functions that were doing the hex encoding and decoding in the stacks-common package and there was an easy replacement with an external crate (faster-hex) in order to improve the performance. The results show a performance increase of about 1% when processing blocks:

$ hyperfine -w 3 -r 10 "./stacks-inspect-hex-modifications replay-block ~/chainstate/ range 99990 100000" "./stacks-inspect-9385b4236 replay-block ~/chainstate/ range 99990 100000"
Benchmark 1: ./stacks-inspect-hex-modifications replay-block ~/chainstate/ range 99990 100000
  Time (mean ± σ):      7.956 s ±  0.036 s    [User: 7.571 s, System: 0.352 s]
  Range (min … max):    7.929 s …  8.052 s    10 runs
 
Benchmark 2: ./stacks-inspect-9385b4236 replay-block ~/chainstate/ range 99990 100000
  Time (mean ± σ):      8.023 s ±  0.021 s    [User: 7.610 s, System: 0.379 s]
  Range (min … max):    7.992 s …  8.061 s    10 runs
 
Summary
  ./stacks-inspect-hex-modifications replay-block ~/chainstate/ range 99990 100000 ran
    1.01 ± 0.01 times faster than ./stacks-inspect-9385b4236 replay-block ~/chainstate/ range 99990 100000

[ASuciuX]

@jcnelson @kantai From the benchmarking results, the implementation with faster-hex is better, but also it adds an extra dependency. Please let me know if you think this is worth adding.

[jbencin]

Looks good. Smaller improvement than I expected. It's up to Aaron and Jude if they are okay introducing a dependency for this

[zone117x]

Might also consider the hex-simd package which is ~2-3x faster than faster-hex https://nugine.github.io/simd-benches/

[codecov]

Codecov Report

All modified and coverable lines are covered by tests ✅

Project coverage is 78.19%. Comparing base (383d586) to head (3317695).
Report is 19 commits behind head on next.

Additional details and impacted files

@@            Coverage Diff             @@
##             next    #4465      +/-   ##
==========================================
- Coverage   83.46%   78.19%   -5.28%     
==========================================
  Files         448      448              
  Lines      324321   324311      -10     
==========================================
- Hits       270698   253585   -17113     
- Misses      53623    70726   +17103     

Files	Coverage Δ
stacks-common/src/util/hash.rs	80.60% <100.00%> (-0.57%)	⬇️
stacks-common/src/util/macros.rs	83.98% <100.00%> (+0.12%)	⬆️
stacks-common/src/util/mod.rs	44.82% <ø> (-8.63%)	⬇️
stackslib/src/blockstack_cli.rs	77.37% <100.00%> (-2.79%)	⬇️

... and 165 files with indirect coverage changes

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[jcnelson]

Per the call today, I think we should defer further consideration of this until we remove hex encode/decode from the DB I/O paths (since that's where a lot of this happens, and in this case, we can just remove the hex codec altogether).

[ASuciuX]

Per the call today, I think we should defer further consideration of this until we remove hex encode/decode from the DB I/O paths (since that's where a lot of this happens, and in this case, we can just remove the hex codec altogether).

I'll convert this into draft till then.