Support string arrays

[romanngg]

Would it be realistic for JAX to support string arrays like numpy does?

[hawkinsp]

It seems unlikely because the underlying infrastructure (XLA) has no support for strings. It's not out of the question that this might change as the compiler infrastructure evolves.

[mattjj]

How about we close this issue for now, though, at least on the JAX issue tracker, since IIUC it's not on the horizon?

[stromal]

I agree with the questioner.
There should be a string support option.
Especially to load in data than encode string to numerical values to do ML is a pretty typical thing to do.

[jakevdp]

I have a prototype of a string array implementation in #12329

I'm not sure whether that PR will go anywhere, but if you have some more concrete examples of potential uses it might motivate more work in that direction