[SciPy-Dev] Changing return types in a public API?

Peter Bell PeterBell10 at live.co.uk
Tue Aug 4 12:23:26 EDT 2020


Hello all,

I've been working towards unifying KDTree and cKDTree in gh-12382<https://github.com/scipy/scipy/pull/12382#discussion_r451491803>. This has raised some general questions about API compatibility that I'd appreciate any thoughts on.

First, KDTree returns NumPy scalars everywhere because the results come from indexing NumPy arrays. Whereas, cKDTree returns python ints wherever possible. Is it reasonable for an API to change from returning NumPy scalars to python int? The NumPy scalars do mimic the array interface to some extent so there is a small interface incompatibility. However, the documentation usually just says a function returns int or float, not NumPy scalar specifically.

Secondly, KDTree uses `dtype=int` everywhere which results in 64-bit integers on linux but 32-bit integers on windows. Ideally, I'd want to return 64-bit integers (or at least np.intp) on all platforms for consistency and to avoid issues with integer overflow. Again, this is behaviour that isn't documented but code could still be relying on implicitly.

- Peter
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