Compatibility with the Array API standard

[TomNicholas]

What is your issue?

Meta-issue to track all the smaller issues around making xarray and the array API standard compatible with each other.

We've already had

• Support NumPy array API (experimental) #6804
• More Array API changes #7067
• Array API fixes for astype #7847

and there will likely be many others.

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I suspect this might require changes to the standard as well as to xarray - in particular see this list of common numpy functions which are not currently in the array API standard. Of these xarray currently uses (FYI @ralfgommers ):

• np.clip
• np.diff
• np.pad
• np.repeat
• np.take
• np.tile

[TomNicholas]

np.pad is an interesting example in the context of chunked arrays (xref #6807) - dask implements it (parallelized using various approaches, including map_blocks internally), but cubed currently doesn't implement it because it's not part of the array API standard. (cc @tomwhite)

[shoyer]

Probably the most important missing feature for Xarray in the Array API standard is support for indexing with integer arrays: data-apis/array-api#669

[kgryte]

Quick update from the Array API standard, both take and tile have been merged in the standard. take is available as of the 2022.12 revision and tile will be included in the 2023 revision.

[TomNicholas]

Thanks @kgryte! We also just bumped our minimum-supported numpy to 1.22 (#8346), which means we could potentially start using numpy.array_api internally for various operations...