Converting CDF epoch values to datetimes is slow

[jameswilburlewis]

Xiangning.Chu@lasp.colorado.edu emailed me asking if we could go back to using unix times internally in pytplot, rather than datetimes. They noticed that conversion of CDF epoch values to datetimes is slow -- perhaps 2-3 times slower than using unix times instead. But converting from unix times to datetime64 values is much faster. So they're wondering if we should go back to using unix times internally.

cdf_to_tplot used to work that way, so we need to understand why it was changed to use datetimes internally.

Maybe there's something the cdflib maintainers can do to speed up the conversion?

[jameswilburlewis]

This issue is probably moot, now that PyHC is advocating for a common time representation across projects, which will probably be astropy times.