NumPy 1.16.0 Release Notes#
This NumPy release is the last one to support Python 2.7 and will be maintained as a long term release with bug fixes until 2020. Support for Python 3.4 been dropped, the supported Python versions are 2.7 and 3.5-3.7. The wheels on PyPI are linked with OpenBLAS v0.3.4+, which should fix the known threading issues found in previous OpenBLAS versions.
Downstream developers building this release should use Cython >= 0.29 and, if using OpenBLAS, OpenBLAS > v0.3.4.
This release has seen a lot of refactoring and features many bug fixes, improved code organization, and better cross platform compatibility. Not all of these improvements will be visible to users, but they should help make maintenance easier going forward.
Highlights#
Experimental (opt-in only) support for overriding numpy functions, see
__array_function__
below.The
matmul
function is now a ufunc. This provides better performance and allows overriding with__array_ufunc__
.Improved support for the ARM and POWER architectures.
Improved support for AIX and PyPy.
Improved interop with ctypes.
Improved support for PEP 3118.
New functions#
New functions added to the numpy.lib.recfuntions module to ease the structured assignment changes:
assign_fields_by_name
structured_to_unstructured
unstructured_to_structured
apply_along_fields
require_fields
See the user guide at <https://docs.scipy.org/doc/numpy/user/basics.rec.html> for more info.
New deprecations#
The type dictionaries numpy.core.typeNA and numpy.core.sctypeNA are deprecated. They were buggy and not documented and will be removed in the 1.18 release. Use
numpy.sctypeDict
instead.The numpy.asscalar function is deprecated. It is an alias to the more powerful
numpy.ndarray.item
, not tested, and fails for scalars.The numpy.set_array_ops and numpy.get_array_ops functions are deprecated. As part of NEP 15, they have been deprecated along with the C-API functions
PyArray_SetNumericOps
andPyArray_GetNumericOps
. Users who wish to override the inner loop functions in built-in ufuncs should usePyUFunc_ReplaceLoopBySignature
.The
numpy.unravel_index
keyword argumentdims
is deprecated, useshape
instead.The
numpy.histogram
normed
argument is deprecated. It was deprecated previously, but no warning was issued.The
positive
operator (+
) applied to non-numerical arrays is deprecated. See below for details.Passing an iterator to the stack functions is deprecated
Expired deprecations#
NaT comparisons now return
False
without a warning, finishing a deprecation cycle begun in NumPy 1.11.np.lib.function_base.unique
was removed, finishing a deprecation cycle begun in NumPy 1.4. Usenumpy.unique
instead.multi-field indexing now returns views instead of copies, finishing a deprecation cycle begun in NumPy 1.7. The change was previously attempted in NumPy 1.14 but reverted until now.
np.PackageLoader
andnp.pkgload
have been removed. These were deprecated in 1.10, had no tests, and seem to no longer work in 1.15.
Future changes#
NumPy 1.17 will drop support for Python 2.7.
Compatibility notes#
f2py script on Windows#
On Windows, the installed script for running f2py is now an .exe
file
rather than a *.py
file and should be run from the command line as f2py
whenever the Scripts
directory is in the path. Running f2py
as a module
python -m numpy.f2py [...]
will work without path modification in any
version of NumPy.
NaT comparisons#
Consistent with the behavior of NaN, all comparisons other than inequality
checks with datetime64 or timedelta64 NaT (“not-a-time”) values now always
return False
, and inequality checks with NaT now always return True
.
This includes comparisons between NaT values. For compatibility with the
old behavior, use np.isnat
to explicitly check for NaT or convert
datetime64/timedelta64 arrays with .astype(np.int64)
before making
comparisons.
complex64/128 alignment has changed#
The memory alignment of complex types is now the same as a C-struct composed of
two floating point values, while before it was equal to the size of the type.
For many users (for instance on x64/unix/gcc) this means that complex64 is now
4-byte aligned instead of 8-byte aligned. An important consequence is that
aligned structured dtypes may now have a different size. For instance,
np.dtype('c8,u1', align=True)
used to have an itemsize of 16 (on x64/gcc)
but now it is 12.
More in detail, the complex64 type now has the same alignment as a C-struct
struct {float r, i;}
, according to the compiler used to compile numpy, and
similarly for the complex128 and complex256 types.
nd_grid __len__ removal#
len(np.mgrid)
and len(np.ogrid)
are now considered nonsensical
and raise a TypeError
.
np.unravel_index
now accepts shape
keyword argument#
Previously, only the dims
keyword argument was accepted
for specification of the shape of the array to be used
for unraveling. dims
remains supported, but is now deprecated.
multi-field views return a view instead of a copy#
Indexing a structured array with multiple fields, e.g., arr[['f1', 'f3']]
,
returns a view into the original array instead of a copy. The returned view
will often have extra padding bytes corresponding to intervening fields in the
original array, unlike before, which will affect code such as
arr[['f1', 'f3']].view('float64')
. This change has been planned since numpy
1.7. Operations hitting this path have emitted FutureWarnings
since then.
Additional FutureWarnings
about this change were added in 1.12.
To help users update their code to account for these changes, a number of
functions have been added to the numpy.lib.recfunctions
module which
safely allow such operations. For instance, the code above can be replaced
with structured_to_unstructured(arr[['f1', 'f3']], dtype='float64')
.
See the “accessing multiple fields” section of the
user guide.
C API changes#
The NPY_FEATURE_VERSION
was incremented to 0x0000D, due to
the addition of:
New Features#
Integrated squared error (ISE) estimator added to histogram
#
This method (bins='stone'
) for optimizing the bin number is a
generalization of the Scott’s rule. The Scott’s rule assumes the distribution
is approximately Normal, while the ISE is a non-parametric method based on
cross-validation.
max_rows
keyword added for np.loadtxt
#
New keyword max_rows
in numpy.loadtxt
sets the maximum rows of the
content to be read after skiprows
, as in numpy.genfromtxt
.
modulus operator support added for np.timedelta64
operands#
The modulus (remainder) operator is now supported for two operands
of type np.timedelta64
. The operands may have different units
and the return value will match the type of the operands.
Improvements#
no-copy pickling of numpy arrays#
Up to protocol 4, numpy array pickling created 2 spurious copies of the data
being serialized. With pickle protocol 5, and the PickleBuffer
API, a
large variety of numpy arrays can now be serialized without any copy using
out-of-band buffers, and with one less copy using in-band buffers. This
results, for large arrays, in an up to 66% drop in peak memory usage.
build shell independence#
NumPy builds should no longer interact with the host machine
shell directly. exec_command
has been replaced with
subprocess.check_output
where appropriate.
np.polynomial.Polynomial classes render in LaTeX in Jupyter notebooks#
When used in a front-end that supports it, Polynomial instances are now rendered through LaTeX. The current format is experimental, and is subject to change.
randint
and choice
now work on empty distributions#
Even when no elements needed to be drawn, np.random.randint
and
np.random.choice
raised an error when the arguments described an empty
distribution. This has been fixed so that e.g.
np.random.choice([], 0) == np.array([], dtype=float64)
.
linalg.lstsq
, linalg.qr
, and linalg.svd
now work with empty arrays#
Previously, a LinAlgError
would be raised when an empty matrix/empty
matrices (with zero rows and/or columns) is/are passed in. Now outputs of
appropriate shapes are returned.
Chain exceptions to give better error messages for invalid PEP3118 format strings#
This should help track down problems.
Einsum optimization path updates and efficiency improvements#
Einsum was synchronized with the current upstream work.
numpy.angle
and numpy.expand_dims
now work on ndarray
subclasses#
In particular, they now work for masked arrays.
NPY_NO_DEPRECATED_API
compiler warning suppression#
Setting NPY_NO_DEPRECATED_API
to a value of 0 will suppress the current compiler
warnings when the deprecated numpy API is used.
np.diff
Added kwargs prepend and append#
New kwargs prepend
and append
, allow for values to be inserted on
either end of the differences. Similar to options for ediff1d. Now the
inverse of cumsum can be obtained easily via prepend=0
.
ARM support updated#
Support for ARM CPUs has been updated to accommodate 32 and 64 bit targets, and also big and little endian byte ordering. AARCH32 memory alignment issues have been addressed. CI testing has been expanded to include AARCH64 targets via the services of shippable.com.
Appending to build flags#
numpy.distutils
has always overridden rather than appended to LDFLAGS and
other similar such environment variables for compiling Fortran extensions.
Now, if the NPY_DISTUTILS_APPEND_FLAGS environment variable is set to 1, the
behavior will be appending. This applied to: LDFLAGS, F77FLAGS,
F90FLAGS, FREEFLAGS, FOPT, FDEBUG, and FFLAGS. See gh-11525 for more
details.
Generalized ufunc signatures now allow fixed-size dimensions#
By using a numerical value in the signature of a generalized ufunc, one can
indicate that the given function requires input or output to have dimensions
with the given size. E.g., the signature of a function that converts a polar
angle to a two-dimensional cartesian unit vector would be ()->(2)
; that
for one that converts two spherical angles to a three-dimensional unit vector
would be (),()->(3)
; and that for the cross product of two
three-dimensional vectors would be (3),(3)->(3)
.
Note that to the elementary function these dimensions are not treated any differently from variable ones indicated with a name starting with a letter; the loop still is passed the corresponding size, but it can now count on that size being equal to the fixed one given in the signature.
Generalized ufunc signatures now allow flexible dimensions#
Some functions, in particular numpy’s implementation of @
as matmul
,
are very similar to generalized ufuncs in that they operate over core
dimensions, but one could not present them as such because they were able to
deal with inputs in which a dimension is missing. To support this, it is now
allowed to postfix a dimension name with a question mark to indicate that the
dimension does not necessarily have to be present.
With this addition, the signature for matmul
can be expressed as
(m?,n),(n,p?)->(m?,p?)
. This indicates that if, e.g., the second operand
has only one dimension, for the purposes of the elementary function it will be
treated as if that input has core shape (n, 1)
, and the output has the
corresponding core shape of (m, 1)
. The actual output array, however, has
the flexible dimension removed, i.e., it will have shape (..., m)
.
Similarly, if both arguments have only a single dimension, the inputs will be
presented as having shapes (1, n)
and (n, 1)
to the elementary
function, and the output as (1, 1)
, while the actual output array returned
will have shape ()
. In this way, the signature allows one to use a
single elementary function for four related but different signatures,
(m,n),(n,p)->(m,p)
, (n),(n,p)->(p)
, (m,n),(n)->(m)
and
(n),(n)->()
.
np.clip
and the clip
method check for memory overlap#
The out
argument to these functions is now always tested for memory overlap
to avoid corrupted results when memory overlap occurs.
New value unscaled
for option cov
in np.polyfit
#
A further possible value has been added to the cov
parameter of the
np.polyfit
function. With cov='unscaled'
the scaling of the covariance
matrix is disabled completely (similar to setting absolute_sigma=True
in
scipy.optimize.curve_fit
). This would be useful in occasions, where the
weights are given by 1/sigma with sigma being the (known) standard errors of
(Gaussian distributed) data points, in which case the unscaled matrix is
already a correct estimate for the covariance matrix.
Detailed docstrings for scalar numeric types#
The help
function, when applied to numeric types such as numpy.intc
,
numpy.int_
, and numpy.longlong
, now lists all of the aliased names for that
type, distinguishing between platform -dependent and -independent aliases.
__module__
attribute now points to public modules#
The __module__
attribute on most NumPy functions has been updated to refer
to the preferred public module from which to access a function, rather than
the module in which the function happens to be defined. This produces more
informative displays for functions in tools such as IPython, e.g., instead of
<function 'numpy.core.fromnumeric.sum'>
you now see
<function 'numpy.sum'>
.
Large allocations marked as suitable for transparent hugepages#
On systems that support transparent hugepages over the madvise system call numpy now marks that large memory allocations can be backed by hugepages which reduces page fault overhead and can in some fault heavy cases improve performance significantly. On Linux the setting for huge pages to be used, /sys/kernel/mm/transparent_hugepage/enabled, must be at least madvise. Systems which already have it set to always will not see much difference as the kernel will automatically use huge pages where appropriate.
Users of very old Linux kernels (~3.x and older) should make sure that /sys/kernel/mm/transparent_hugepage/defrag is not set to always to avoid performance problems due concurrency issues in the memory defragmentation.
Alpine Linux (and other musl c library distros) support#
We now default to use fenv.h for floating point status error reporting. Previously we had a broken default that sometimes would not report underflow, overflow, and invalid floating point operations. Now we can support non-glibc distributions like Alpine Linux as long as they ship fenv.h.
Speedup np.block
for large arrays#
Large arrays (greater than 512 * 512
) now use a blocking algorithm based on
copying the data directly into the appropriate slice of the resulting array.
This results in significant speedups for these large arrays, particularly for
arrays being blocked along more than 2 dimensions.
arr.ctypes.data_as(...)
holds a reference to arr#
Previously the caller was responsible for keeping the array alive for the lifetime of the pointer.
Speedup np.take
for read-only arrays#
The implementation of np.take
no longer makes an unnecessary copy of the
source array when its writeable
flag is set to False
.
Support path-like objects for more functions#
The np.core.records.fromfile
function now supports pathlib.Path
and other path-like objects in addition to a file object. Furthermore, the
np.load
function now also supports path-like objects when using memory
mapping (mmap_mode
keyword argument).
Better behaviour of ufunc identities during reductions#
Universal functions have an .identity
which is used when .reduce
is
called on an empty axis.
As of this release, the logical binary ufuncs, logical_and, logical_or,
and logical_xor, now have identity
s of type bool, where previously they
were of type int. This restores the 1.14 behavior of getting bool
s when
reducing empty object arrays with these ufuncs, while also keeping the 1.15
behavior of getting int
s when reducing empty object arrays with arithmetic
ufuncs like add
and multiply
.
Additionally, logaddexp now has an identity of -inf
, allowing it to be
called on empty sequences, where previously it could not be.
This is possible thanks to the new
PyUFunc_FromFuncAndDataAndSignatureAndIdentity
, which allows
arbitrary values to be used as identities now.
Improved conversion from ctypes objects#
Numpy has always supported taking a value or type from ctypes
and
converting it into an array or dtype, but only behaved correctly for simpler
types. As of this release, this caveat is lifted - now:
The
_pack_
attribute ofctypes.Structure
, used to emulate C’s__attribute__((packed))
, is respected.Endianness of all ctypes objects is preserved
ctypes.Union
is supportedNon-representable constructs raise exceptions, rather than producing dangerously incorrect results:
Bitfields are no longer interpreted as sub-arrays
Pointers are no longer replaced with the type that they point to
A new ndpointer.contents
member#
This matches the .contents
member of normal ctypes arrays, and can be used
to construct an np.array
around the pointers contents. This replaces
np.array(some_nd_pointer)
, which stopped working in 1.15. As a side effect
of this change, ndpointer
now supports dtypes with overlapping fields and
padding.
matmul
is now a ufunc
#
numpy.matmul
is now a ufunc which means that both the function and the
__matmul__
operator can now be overridden by __array_ufunc__
. Its
implementation has also changed. It uses the same BLAS routines as
numpy.dot
, ensuring its performance is similar for large matrices.
Start and stop arrays for linspace
, logspace
and geomspace
#
These functions used to be limited to scalar stop and start values, but can now take arrays, which will be properly broadcast and result in an output which has one axis prepended. This can be used, e.g., to obtain linearly interpolated points between sets of points.
CI extended with additional services#
We now use additional free CI services, thanks to the companies that provide:
Codecoverage testing via codecov.io
Arm testing via shippable.com
Additional test runs on azure pipelines
These are in addition to our continued use of travis, appveyor (for wheels) and LGTM
Changes#
Comparison ufuncs will now error rather than return NotImplemented#
Previously, comparison ufuncs such as np.equal
would return
NotImplemented if their arguments had structured dtypes, to help comparison
operators such as __eq__
deal with those. This is no longer needed, as the
relevant logic has moved to the comparison operators proper (which thus do
continue to return NotImplemented as needed). Hence, like all other ufuncs,
the comparison ufuncs will now error on structured dtypes.
Positive will now raise a deprecation warning for non-numerical arrays#
Previously, +array
unconditionally returned a copy. Now, it will
raise a DeprecationWarning
if the array is not numerical (i.e.,
if np.positive(array)
raises a TypeError
. For ndarray
subclasses that override the default __array_ufunc__
implementation,
the TypeError
is passed on.
NDArrayOperatorsMixin
now implements matrix multiplication#
Previously, np.lib.mixins.NDArrayOperatorsMixin
did not implement the
special methods for Python’s matrix multiplication operator (@
). This has
changed now that matmul
is a ufunc and can be overridden using
__array_ufunc__
.
The scaling of the covariance matrix in np.polyfit
is different#
So far, np.polyfit
used a non-standard factor in the scaling of the the
covariance matrix. Namely, rather than using the standard chisq/(M-N)
, it
scaled it with chisq/(M-N-2)
where M is the number of data points and N is the
number of parameters. This scaling is inconsistent with other fitting programs
such as e.g. scipy.optimize.curve_fit
and was changed to chisq/(M-N)
.
maximum
and minimum
no longer emit warnings#
As part of code introduced in 1.10, float32
and float64
set invalid
float status when a Nan is encountered in numpy.maximum
and numpy.minimum
,
when using SSE2 semantics. This caused a RuntimeWarning to sometimes be
emitted. In 1.15 we fixed the inconsistencies which caused the warnings to
become more conspicuous. Now no warnings will be emitted.
Umath and multiarray c-extension modules merged into a single module#
The two modules were merged, according to NEP 15. Previously np.core.umath and np.core.multiarray were separate c-extension modules. They are now python wrappers to the single np.core/_multiarray_math c-extension module.
getfield
validity checks extended#
numpy.ndarray.getfield
now checks the dtype and offset arguments to prevent
accessing invalid memory locations.
NumPy functions now support overrides with __array_function__
#
NumPy has a new experimental mechanism for overriding the implementation of
almost all NumPy functions on non-NumPy arrays by defining an
__array_function__
method, as described in NEP 18.
This feature is not yet been enabled by default, but has been released to facilitate experimentation by potential users. See the NEP for details on setting the appropriate environment variable. We expect the NumPy 1.17 release will enable overrides by default, which will also be more performant due to a new implementation written in C.
Arrays based off readonly buffers cannot be set writeable
#
We now disallow setting the writeable
flag True on arrays created
from fromstring(readonly-buffer)
.