Array API standard compatibility#
NumPy’s main namespace as well as the numpy.fft and numpy.linalg namespaces
are compatible [1] with the
2022.12 version
of the Python array API standard.
NumPy aims to implement support for the 2023.12 version and future versions of the standard - assuming that those future versions can be upgraded to given NumPy’s backwards compatibility policy.
For usage guidelines for downstream libraries and end users who want to write code that will work with both NumPy and other array libraries, we refer to the documentation of the array API standard itself and to code and developer-focused documention in SciPy and scikit-learn.
Note that in order to use standard-complaint code with older NumPy versions (< 2.0), the array-api-compat package may be useful. For testing whether NumPy-using code is only using standard-compliant features rather than anything NumPy-specific, the array-api-strict package can be used.
History
NumPy 1.22.0 was the first version to include support for the array API
standard, via a separate numpy.array_api submodule. This module was
marked as experimental (it emitted a warning on import) and removed in
NumPy 2.0 because full support was included in the main namespace.
NEP 47 and
NEP 56
describe the motivation and scope for implementing the array API standard
in NumPy.
Entry point#
NumPy installs an entry point that can be used for discovery purposes:
>>> from importlib.metadata import entry_points
>>> entry_points(group='array_api', name='numpy')
[EntryPoint(name='numpy', value='numpy', group='array_api')]
Note that leaving out name='numpy' will cause a list of entry points to be
returned for all array API standard compatible implementations that installed
an entry point.
Footnotes
Inspection#
NumPy implements the array API inspection utilities.
These functions can be accessed via the __array_namespace_info__()
function, which returns a namespace containing the inspection utilities.
Get the array API inspection namespace for NumPy. |