assert,util: improve comparison performance #1835

Job	Run time
Build slim tarball	1m 19s
aarch64-linux: with shared libraries	26m 1s
aarch64-darwin: with shared libraries	23m 31s
x86_64-linux: with shared libraries	29m 27s
x86_64-darwin: with shared libraries	41m 7s
	2h 1m 25s

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