This is a suggestion/request to speed up Histogram.

Histogram is ridiculously slow compared to what it could be. Consider just this simple example:

In[156]:= data = RandomReal[1, 5000000];

In[157]:= BinCounts[
   data,
   0.1
   ]; // AbsoluteTiming

Out[157]= {0.069129, Null}

In[158]:= HistogramList[
   data,
   {0.1}
   ]; // AbsoluteTiming

Out[158]= {14.6606, Null}

In[159]:= Tally@Quotient[data, 0.1]; // AbsoluteTiming

Out[159]= {0.038678, Null}

Histogram is 150 times slower than BinCounts. Going from BinCounts to a good quality figure is not at all trivial. It might not be difficult but it certainly takes time. Dealing with this shortcoming of Histogram is often a significant time waster.

I understand that Histogram can do lot more than BinCounts, but in the most common use case it just doesn't have to. In this example above they do the exact same thing. Histogram should have special case optimizations for the most common use case.

Please fix Histogram.