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NumPy Roadmap

This is a live snapshot of tasks and features we will be investing resources in. It may be used to encourage and inspire developers and to search for funding.

Interoperability

We aim to make it easier to interoperate with NumPy. There are many NumPy-like packages that add interesting new capabilities to the Python ecosystem, as well as many libraries that extend NumPy's model in various ways. Work in NumPy to facilitate interoperability with all such packages, and the code that uses them, may include (among other things) interoperability protocols, better duck typing support and ndarray subclass handling.

The __array_ufunc__ and __array_function__ protocols are stable, but do not cover the whole API. New protocols for overriding other functionality in NumPy are needed. Work in this area aims to bring to completion one or more of the following proposals:

In addition we aim to provide ways to make it easier for other libraries to implement a NumPy-compatible API. This may include defining consistent subsets of the API, as discussed in this section of NEP 37.

Extensibility

We aim to make it much easier to extend NumPy. The primary topic here is to improve the dtype system.

  • Easier custom dtypes:
    • Simplify and/or wrap the current C-API
    • More consistent support for dtype metadata
    • Support for writing a dtype in Python
  • New string dtype(s):
    • Encoded strings with fixed-width storage (utf8, latin1, ...) and/or
    • Variable length strings (could share implementation with dtype=object, but are explicitly type-checked)
    • One of these should probably be the default for text data. The current behavior on Python 3 is neither efficient nor user friendly.

Performance

Improvements to NumPy's performance are important to many users. The primary topic at the moment is better use of SIMD instructions, also on platforms other than x86 - see :ref:`NEP38`.

Other performance improvement ideas include:

  • Reducing ufunc and __array_function__ overhead.
  • Optimizations in individual functions.
  • A better story around parallel execution.

Furthermore we would like to improve the benchmarking system, in terms of coverage, easy of use, and publication of the results (now here) as part of the docs or website.

Website and documentation

The NumPy documentation is of varying quality. The API documentation is in good shape; tutorials and high-level documentation on many topics are missing or outdated. See :ref:`NEP44` for planned improvements.

Our website (https://numpy.org) was completely redesigned recently. We aim to further improve it by adding translations, better Hugo-Sphinx integration via a new Sphinx theme, and more (see this tracking issue).

User experience

Type annotations

We aim to add type annotations for all NumPy functionality, so users can use tools like mypy to type check their code and IDEs can improve their support for NumPy. The existing type stubs in the numpy-stubs repository are being improved and will be moved into the NumPy code base.

Platform support

We aim to increase our support for different hardware architectures. This includes adding CI coverage when CI services are available, providing wheels on PyPI for ARM64 (aarch64) and POWER8/9 (ppc64le), providing better build and install documentation, and resolving build issues on other platforms like AIX.

Maintenance

  • MaskedArray needs to be improved, ideas include:
    • Rewrite masked arrays to not be a ndarray subclass -- maybe in a separate project?
    • MaskedArray as a duck-array type, and/or
    • dtypes that support missing values
  • Fortran integration via numpy.f2py requires a number of improvements, see this tracking issue.
  • A backend system for numpy.fft (so that e.g. fft-mkl doesn't need to monkeypatch numpy).
  • Write a strategy on how to deal with overlap between NumPy and SciPy for linalg.
  • Deprecate np.matrix (very slowly).
  • Add new indexing modes for "vectorized indexing" and "outer indexing" (see :ref:`NEP21`).
  • Make the polynomial API easier to use.
  • Integrate an improved text file loader.
  • Ufunc and gufunc improvements, see gh-8892 and gh-11492.