I'm pleased to announce the NumPy 1.12.0rc2 New Year's release. This release supports Python 2.7 and 3.4-3.6. Wheels for all supported Python versions may be downloaded from PiPY, the tarball and zip files may be downloaded from Github. The release notes and files hashes may also be found at Github .

NumPy 1.12.0rc 2 is the result of 413 pull requests submitted by 139 contributors and comprises a large number of fixes and improvements. Among the many improvements it is difficult to  pick out just a few as standing above the others, but the following may be of particular interest or indicate areas likely to have future consequences.

* Order of operations in ``np.einsum`` can now be optimized for large speed improvements.
* New ``signature`` argument to ``np.vectorize`` for vectorizing with core dimensions.
* The ``keepdims`` argument was added to many functions.
* New context manager for testing warnings
* Support for BLIS in numpy.distutils
* Much improved support for PyPy (not yet finished)