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 key goal is: make it easy for code written for NumPy to also work with other NumPy-like projects. This will enable GPU support via, e.g, CuPy, JAX or PyTorch, distributed array support via Dask, and writing special-purpose arrays (either from scratch, or as a numpy.ndarray subclass) that work well with SciPy, scikit-learn and other such packages. A large step forward in this area was made in NumPy 2.0, with adoption of and compliance with the array API standard (v2022.12, see NEP 47 — Adopting the array API standard). Future work in this direction will include support for newer versions of the array API standard, and adding features as needed based on real-world experience and needs.

In addition, the __array_ufunc__ and __array_function__ protocols fulfill a role here - they are stable and used by several downstream projects.

Performance#

Improvements to NumPy’s performance are important to many users. We have focused this effort on Universal SIMD (see NEP 38 — Using SIMD optimization instructions for performance) intrinsics which provide nice improvements across various hardware platforms via an abstraction layer. The infrastructure is in place, and we welcome follow-on PRs to add SIMD support across relevant NumPy functionality.

Transitioning from C to C++, both in the SIMD infrastructure and in NumPy internals more widely, is in progress. We have also started to make use of Google Highway (see NEP 54 — SIMD infrastructure evolution: adopting Google Highway when moving to C++?), and that usage is likely to expand. Work towards support for newer SIMD instruction sets, like SVE on arm64, is ongoing.

Other performance improvement ideas include:

  • A better story around parallel execution (related is support for free-threaded CPython, see further down).

  • Enable the ability to allow NumPy to use faster, but less precise, implementations for ufuncs. Until now, the only state modifying ufunc behavior has been np.errstate. But, with NumPy 2.0 improvements in the np.errstate and the ufunc C implementation make this type of addition easier.

  • Optimizations in individual functions.

Furthermore we would like to improve the benchmarking system, in terms of coverage, easy of use, and publication of the results. Benchmarking PRs/branches compared to the main branch is a primary purpose, and required for PRs that are performance-focused (e.g., adding SIMD acceleration to a function). In addition, we’d like a performance overview like the one we had here, set up in a way that is more maintainable long-term.

Documentation and website#

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 NEP 44 — Restructuring the NumPy documentation for planned improvements. Adding more tutorials is underway in the numpy-tutorials repo.

We also intend to make all the example code in our documentation interactive - work is underway to do so via jupyterlite-sphinx and Pyodide.

Our website (https://numpy.org) is in good shape. Further work on expanding the number of languages that the website is translated in is desirable. As are improvements to the interactive notebook widget, through JupyterLite.

Extensibility#

We aim to continue making it easier to extend NumPy. The primary topic here is to improve the dtype system - see for example NEP 41 — First step towards a new datatype system and related NEPs linked from it. In NumPy 2.0, a new C API for user-defined dtypes was made public. We aim to encourage its usage and improve this API further, including support for writing a dtype in Python.

Ideas for new dtypes that may be developed outside of the main NumPy repository first, and that could potentially be upstreamed into NumPy later, include:

  • A quad-precision (128-bit) dtype

  • A bfloat16 dtype

  • A fixed-width string dtype which supports encodings (e.g., utf8 or latin1)

  • A unit dtype

We further plan to extend the ufunc C API as needs arise. One possibility here is creating a new, more powerful, API to allow hooking into existing NumPy ufunc implementations.

User experience#

Type annotations#

Type annotations for most NumPy functionality is complete (although some submodules like numpy.ma are missing return types), so users can use tools like mypy to type check their code and IDEs can improve their support for NumPy. Improving those type annotations, for example to support annotating array shapes (see gh-16544), is ongoing.

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 platforms that are in high enough demand (e.g., we added musllinux ones for NumPy 2.0), and resolving build issues on platforms that we don’t test in CI (e.g., AIX).

We intend to write a NEP covering the support levels we provide and what is required for a platform to move to a higher tier of support, similar to PEP 11.

Further consistency fixes to promotion and scalar logic#

NumPy 2.0 fixed many issues around promotion especially with respect to scalars. We plan to continue fixing remaining inconsistencies. For example, NumPy converts 0-D objects to scalars, and some promotions still allowed by NumPy are problematic.

Support for free-threaded CPython#

CPython 3.13 will be the first release to offer a free-threaded build (i.e., a CPython build with the GIL disabled). Work is in progress to support this well in NumPy. After that is stable and complete, there may be opportunities to actually make use of the potential for performance improvements from free-threaded CPython, or make it easier to do so for NumPy’s users.

Binary size reduction#

The number of downloads of NumPy from PyPI and other platforms continues to increase - as of May 2024 we’re at >200 million downloads/month from PyPI alone. Reducing the size of an installed NumPy package has many benefits: faster installs, lower disk space usage, smaller load on PyPI, less environmental impact, easier to fit more packages on top of NumPy in resource-constrained environments and platforms like AWS Lambda, lower latency for Pyodide users, and so on. We aim for significant reductions, as well as making it easier for end users and packagers to produce smaller custom builds (e.g., we added support for stripping tests before 2.1.0). See gh-25737 for details.

Support use of CPython’s limited C API#

Use of the CPython limited C API, allowing producing abi3 wheels that use the stable ABI and are hence independent of CPython feature releases, has benefits for both downstream packages that use NumPy’s C API and for NumPy itself. In NumPy 2.0, work was done to enable using the limited C API with the Cython support in NumPy (see `gh-25531 <https://github.com/numpy/numpy/pull/25531`__). More work and testing is needed to ensure full support for downstream packages.

We also want to explore what is needed for NumPy itself to use the limited C API - this would make testing new CPython dev and pre-release versions across the ecosystem easier, and significantly reduce the maintenance effort for CI jobs in NumPy itself.

Create a header-only package for NumPy#

We have reduced the platform-dependent content in the public NumPy headers to almost nothing. It is now feasible to create a separate package with only NumPy headers and a discovery mechanism for them, in order to enable downstream packages to build against the NumPy C API without having NumPy installed. This will make it easier/cheaper to use NumPy’s C API, especially on more niche platforms for which we don’t provide wheels.

NumPy 2.0 stabilization & downstream usage#

We made a very large amount of changes (and improvements!) in NumPy 2.0. The release process has taken a very long time, and part of the ecosystem is still catching up. We may need to slow down for a while, and possibly help the rest of the ecosystem with adapting to the ABI and API changes.

We will need to assess the costs and benefits to NumPy itself, downstream package authors, and end users. Based on that assessment, we need to come to a conclusion on whether it’s realistic to do another ABI-breaking release again in the future or not. This will also inform the future evolution of our C API.

Security#

NumPy is quite secure - we get only a limited number of reports about potential vulnerabilities, and most of those are incorrect. We have made strides with a documented security policy, a private disclosure method, and maintaining an OpenSSF scorecard (with a high score). However, we have not changed much in how we approach supply chain security in quite a while. We aim to make improvements here, for example achieving fully reproducible builds for all the build artifacts we publish - and providing full provenance information for them.

Maintenance#

  • numpy.ma is still in poor shape and under-maintained. It 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

  • Write a strategy on how to deal with overlap between NumPy and SciPy for linalg.

  • Deprecate np.matrix (very slowly) - this is feasible once the switch-over from sparse matrices to sparse arrays in SciPy is complete.

  • Add new indexing modes for “vectorized indexing” and “outer indexing” (see NEP 21 — Simplified and explicit advanced indexing).

  • Make the polynomial API easier to use.

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