Improvements/changes should be validated via a set of benchmarks before being committed. To do that, though, first a suite of benchmarks must be created and added.
First level goal is to just provide a basic suite which can be run manually.
Second level would be to add some performance assertions that compare pairs of benchmarks within the suite (such as the scalar calculation should be faster than a length-1 vector calculation).
Third level is to provide a framework for running and summarizing the benchmarks across multiple architectures (i.e. compare personal laptop and desktop which have Intel vs AMD processors from different generations).
Improvements/changes should be validated via a set of benchmarks before being committed. To do that, though, first a suite of benchmarks must be created and added.