Rust-based cftime Implementation for Python

Is your feature request related to a problem?

I developped a rust based project with python bindings code to parse the CF time conventions and deal with datetime operations.

You can find the project on GitHub at https://github.com/antscloud/cftime-rs.

It was something missing in the rust ecosystem to deal with NetCDF files, As the project in Rust hits its first working version, I wanted to explore the maturin ecosystem and the Rust as a backend for python code.
I ended up creating a new cftime implementation for python that have significant perfomance improvement (somewhere between 4 times to 20 times faster depending on the use case) over cftime original Cython code.

There are surely missing features compared to cftime and need to be tested more, but I think it could be interested as a replacement for some xarray operations (mainly for speed) regarding some of the issues of topic-cftime label

Please, let me know if xarray team could be interested. If you are, I can open a pull request to see it is possible, where it breaks the unit tests and if it's worth it

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Start by reviewing the cftime-rs project and the open issues under the topic-cftime label. Compare its current feature coverage with xarray's cftime-related behavior and run the relevant unit tests before proposing integration. Done would require an agreed scope, demonstrated compatibility, and a pull request whose test impact is understood.