Hello, Almost punctually for EuroScipy we have finally managed to release the first release candidate of NumPy 1.9. We intend to only fix bugs until the final release which we plan to do in the next 1-2 weeks. In this release numerous performance improvements have been added, most significantly the indexing code has been rewritten be several times faster for most cases and performance of using small arrays and scalars has almost doubled. Plenty of other functions have been improved too, nonzero, where, count_nonzero, floating point min/max, boolean argmin/argmax, searchsorted, triu/tril, masked sorting can be expected to perform significantly better in many cases. Also NumPy now releases the GIL for more functions, most notably the indexing now releases it and the random modules state object has a private lock instead of using the GIL. This allows leveraging pure python threads more efficiently. In order to make working with arrays containing NaN values easier nanmedian and nanpercentile have been added which ignore these values. These functions and the regular median and percentile now also support generalized axis arguments that ufuncs already have, these allow reducing along multiple axis in one call. Please see the release notes for all the details. Please also take not of the many small compatibility notes and deprecation in the notes. https://github.com/numpy/numpy/blob/maintenance/1.9.x/doc/release/1.9.0-note... The source tarballs and win32 binaries can be downloaded here: https://sourceforge.net/projects/numpy/files/NumPy/1.9.0rc1 Cheers, Julian Taylor