My previous post mentioned some efforts to improve the performance of the siunitx parser. I’ve now committed an entirely new version of the parsing code to the repository. For the interested reader, an siunitx snapshot TDS-style .zip is available.
One thing that I find interesting in all of this is that even before optimising the code, version 2 still worked faster than version 1, even though it does more things. A lot of that is because the pre-built looping material in expl3 does a much better job than my own attempts in version 1 of siunitx. Of course, good programmers will always use fast loops, but for the rest of us I think this shows how a sensible tool-kit can bring benefits ‘behind the scenes’.