[Numpy-discussion] Disallow Accelerate as a LAPACK backend for NumPy

[Derek Homeier]

On 12 Nov 2019, at 3:27 am, Ian Henriksen <insertinterestingnamehere at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> Extra data point here: SciPy already dropped support for Accelerate as of version 1.2.0.
> 
> Best,
> 
> Ian Henriksen
> 
> 
> On Mon, Nov 11, 2019 at 6:40 PM Matti Picus <matti.picus at gmail.com> wrote:
> Apple has dropped support for Accelerate. It has bugs that have not been 
> fixed, and is closed source so we cannot fix them ourselves. We have 
> been getting a handful of reports from users who end up building NumPy 
> on macOS, and inadvertently link to Accelerate, then end up with wrong 
> linalg results. In PR 14880 https://github.com/numpy/numpy/pull/14880 I 
> propose to disallow finding it when building NumPy. At this time it will 
> remain in distutils as one of the backends to support users, but how do 
> people feel about a future PR to totally remove it?

+1 from this side - when switching the packaged version of Scipy to OpenBLAS
(already taking Numpy along the way) I noticed barely any performance penalties
(if - with some benchmarks - it wasn’t actually faster than Accelerate).

Cheers,
				Derek