The NumPy 2.3.0 main namespace as well as the
and
namespaces are compatible with the
of the Python array API standard.
NumPy aims to implement support for the future versions of the standard - assuming that those future versions can be upgraded to given NumPy’s
backwards compatibility policy
.
For usage guidelines for downstream libraries and end users who want to write code that will work with both NumPy and other array libraries, we refer to the documentation of the array API standard itself and to code and developer-focused documentation in SciPy and scikit-learn.
Note that in order to use standard-complaint code with older NumPy versions (< 2.0), the
package may be useful. For testing whether NumPy-using code is only using standard-compliant features rather than anything NumPy-specific, the
package can be used.
History
NumPy 1.22.0 was the first version to include support for the array API standard, via a separate numpy.array_api submodule. This module was marked as experimental (it emitted a warning on import) and removed in NumPy 2.0 because full support (2022.12 version
) was included in the main namespace.
and
describe the motivation and scope for implementing the array API standard in NumPy.
Entry point
NumPy installs an
that can be used for discovery purposes:
>>> fromimportlib.metadataimportentry_points>>> entry_points(group='array_api',name='numpy')[EntryPoint(name='numpy', value='numpy', group='array_api')]Note that leaving out name='numpy' will cause a list of entry points to be returned for all array API standard compatible implementations that installed an entry point.
Footnotes
Inspection
NumPy implements the
array API inspection utilities
. These functions can be accessed via the __array_namespace_info__() function, which returns a namespace containing the inspection utilities.