unit performance benchmark

[ngoldbaum]

I just submitted a paper to the Journal of Open Source Software presenting unyt, a new Python library I'm releasing based on yt.units. The idea is that it will enable people to use yt's unit system without depending on all of yt. Eventually we will make yt.units use unyt under the hood.

The reason I'm opening an issue is that part of the paper includes a performance benchmark (see benchmarks/bench.py in the unyt repo) comparing the performance of unyt, Pint, and astropy.units. In general Pint comes in behind both astropy.units and unyt, except for the benchmarks of the sqrt and power function, where it comes in second place.

You can see a preprint of the paper in the unyt repository:

https://github.com/yt-project/unyt/blob/master/paper/paper.pdf

It will also hopefully be on the arxiv soon (assuming it makes it past the arxiv moderators). In principle the library will be getting updates from the JOSS review process, but I'm expecting the results to not change much before the paper is accepted.

I'm opening this issue not as a challenge or as a brag, but in the hope that all three unit libraries (and their users) will benefit from the benchmarks. I'm also very happy to help out with reproducing the benchmarks.