On Tue, Nov 25, 2025 at 10:47 AM Sebastian Berg <[email protected]> wrote:
> On Mon, 2025-11-24 at 10:33 -0800, Amelia Thurdekoos wrote: > > > ...could we at least try to use the bit width in the name such as > > > float16 > > > as much as possible? > > > > > > This is all excellent feedback, thank you! I agree, more explicit is > > better. Planning as best as we can with an eye to future clarity, > > seems > > reasonable. > > > > > > > The important part here seems to be pushing the goal of getting rid > > > of > > > npy_math, what is the plan for the rest of it here? Just getting > > > rid > > > of it completely because it is obsolete? > > > > > > > > If we introduce this now users will adopt it in 2-3 years (old NumPy > > > versions don't have it). > > > Now there is no guarantee that e.g. `float16_t` will be generally > > > supported (it's optional anyway) but if the situation around half > > > improves just a little, I wonder if by the time this is useful it > > > won't > > > already be completely obsolete, rather than just mostly. > > > > > > Thanks for the feedback Sebastian! I agree, the overarching goal is > > removing npy_math. This proposal's scope is intentionally limited to > > the > > float16/halffloat part as one self-contained step in that direction, > > rather > > than trying to solve the whole npy_math feature at once. I am not > > going to > > be removing any part of the library as part of this effort. > > > > If float16 improves enough that this API becomes obsolete, or even > > less > > attractive, this effort still yields a net positive. It will assist > > with > > reducing the need to link against npy_math. > > > > > Yeah, nice and I agree with Nathan that it is tedious for e.g. DType > casts. ml_dtypes uses the Eigen for this purpose CuPy vendors [1]. > > If `npy_math` wouldn't be deleted it would be nice to have a thought on > what happens with it (since we could probably use the same thing for > half). But I think the hope is to just delete and I don't want to > block this if this seems like the main blocker. > To keep us on the same page: `libnpymath`, not `npy_math.h` (the latter exposes functionality that doesn't need the static library as well). But indeed - ideally we'd like to move as many users as possible off of the static library, so we can just delete it. We managed for `statsmodels` recently; `scipy` still is tricky and it may need to vendor some code. The other plan is to do what we do sometimes for legacy code and split it off as a standalone package that remaining users can then vendor. We already had this in progress quite a while back, that effort just stalled for now. See https://github.com/numpy/libnpymath > However, it still seems to me like only the conversions are (for now?) > truly useful. And I also still wonder if header-only may not be just as > well and simpler for all sides? > I would also be happy to consider to only keep the conversion functions > and ask users who need serious math to look elsewhere, because for now > I still suspect it's not hard to find things elsewhere (e.g. Eigen). (Yes, I am assuming that would throw at least close to zero > persons/projects under the bus if this starts missing.) > I'm not sure something like Eigen is a reasonable thing to point to, that's a very heavy dependency. That said, I don't think we need to either, since the header-only approach seems to work. Cheers, Ralf > > - Sebastian > > [1] For now CuPy never compiled against NumPy, if it does there are > better replacements, i.e. CuPy wouldn't need this functionality. > > > > - Amelia > > _______________________________________________ > > NumPy-Discussion mailing list -- [email protected] > > To unsubscribe send an email to [email protected] > > https://mail.python.org/mailman3//lists/numpy-discussion.python.org > > Member address: [email protected] > _______________________________________________ > NumPy-Discussion mailing list -- [email protected] > To unsubscribe send an email to [email protected] > https://mail.python.org/mailman3//lists/numpy-discussion.python.org > Member address: [email protected] >
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