I recently posted a few ‘notes to myself’ about future directions in siunitx development. With them down in print, I’ve been giving them some serious thought and have made a proper start on work on version 3 of the package. I’m starting where I’m happiest: the unit parser and related code, and am working on proper separation of different parts of the code. That’s not easy work, but I think it should give me a good platform to build on. I’m also working hard to make the new code show ‘best practice’ in LaTeX3 coding: the plan is to have much richer documentation and some test material to go with the new code. Looking forward, that should make creating a ‘pure’ LaTeX3 units module pretty easy: it will be a minor set of edits from what I’m working on now.
I’ve got a good idea of the amount of work I need to do: there are about 17k lines in the current siunitx.dtx, which comes out to around 7.5k lines of code. That sounds like a lot, but as much of what I need to do is more editing that writing from scratch I’m hoping for an alpha build of version 3 some time this summer.