Laspy is over 2 times faster than PDAL at reading LAS files

Here you have a totally unscientific, but still interesting, benchmark made while I was waiting for pdal to finish, isn’t that a bit crazy that is so slow?

import pdal
import laspy

file = "PNOA_2023_ARA_568-4570_NPC01.laz"

!ls -lh $file

-rw-r--r--. 1 simone simone 48M Mar  9 16:11 PNOA_2023_ARA_568-4570_NPC01.laz

pdal.Reader.las(filename=file).pipeline().execute()

1.71 s ± 117 ms per loop (mean ± std. dev. of 7 runs, 1 loop each)

las = laspy.read(file)

773 ms ± 85.4 ms per loop (mean ± std. dev. of 7 runs, 1 loop each)

0.773 / 1.71

0.45204678362573103