Porting Essential ERFA Functions to Julia

The JuliaAstro organization equips astronomers with tools developed in Julia language that they can include in their daily workflow and do impactful research. The AstronomicalTime.Jl package provides a new data type “Epoch” which is capable of handling conversions between different timescales using efficient routines. Currently, the AstronomicalTime package relies on ERFA.jl for handling conversions between different time scales. ERFA.jl further ccalls liberfa, a library written in C programming language. This proposal aims to write all the liberfa function used in AstronomicalTIme.jl in pure Julia, increasing the ease of development and making the package extensible by using Julia's flexible user-defined types.