On behalf of the NumPy team, I'm pleased to announce the release of NumPy 1.22.0rc1. NumPy 1.22.0rc1 is a big release featuring the work of 150 contributers spread over 575 pull requests. There have been many improvements,
highlights are:
- Annotations of the main namespace are essentially complete. Upstream is a moving target, so there will likely be further improvements, but the major work is done. This is probably the most user visible enhancement in this release.
- A preliminary version of the proposed Array-API is provided. This is a step in creating a standard collection of functions that can be used across applications such as CuPy and JAX.
- NumPy now has a DLPack backend. DLPack provides a common interchange format for array (tensor) data.
- New methods for `quantile`, `percentile`, and related functions. Thenew methods provide a complete set of the methods commonly found in the literature.
- A new configurable allocator for use by downstream projects.
These are in addition to the ongoing work to provide SIMD support for commonly used functions, improvements to F2PY, and better documentation.
The Python versions supported in this release are 3.8-3.10, Python 3.7 has been dropped. Note that 32 bit wheels are only provided for Python 3.8 and 3.9 on Windows, all other wheels are 64 bits on account of Ubuntu, Fedora, and other Linux distributions dropping 32 bit support. All 64 bit wheels are also linked with 64 bit OpenBLAS, which should fix the occasional problems encountered by folks using truly huge arrays. Wheels can be downloaded from
PyPI; source archives, release notes, and wheel hashes are available on
Github. Linux users will need pip >= 0.19.3 in order to install the manylinux2014 wheels. A recent version of pip is needed to install the universal2 macos wheels.