In the benchmark added here, fmt's dragonbox is ~3x faster than our own
Ryu implementation (1197ms for dragonbox vs. 3435ms for Ryu).
Daniel Lemire recently published an article about these algorithms:
https://lemire.me/blog/2026/02/01/converting-floats-to-strings-quickly/
In this article, fmt's dragonbox implementation is actually one of the
slower ones (with the caveat that some comments note that the article is
a bit out-of-date). I've gone with fmt here because:
1. It has a readily available recent version on vcpkg.
2. It provides the methods we need to actually convert a floating point
to decimal exponential form.
3. There is an ongoing effort to replace dragonbox with a new algorithm,
zmij, which promises to be faster.
4. It is one of the only users of AK/UFixedBigInt, so we can potentially
remove that as well soon.
5. Bringing in fmt opens the door to replacing a bunch of AK::format
facilities with fmt as well.
Our floating point number parser was based on the fast_float library:
https://github.com/fastfloat/fast_float
However, our implementation only supports 8-bit characters. To support
UTF-16, we will need to be able to convert char16_t-based strings to
numbers as well. This works out-of-the-box with fast_float.
We can also use fast_float for integer parsing.
