It looks like no one responded so the NEP is accepted! I'll send in a PR to mark it as such.
On reflection, I think that we're probably too close to the NumPy 2.6 release to merge my ByteStringDType PR, with a bunch of functionality left to be filled in per the NEP. I was hoping I'd have a month to do that before the 2.6 branch but as usual timelines on this stuff slipped a bit. I'm now planning to merge ByteStringDType shortly after 2.6 is branched, leaving the 2.7 development window to do followup work in smaller chunks. I still think it would be nice to have https://github.com/numpy/numpy/pull/32757 in 2.6 but it's OK if we wait on that too. I think this is also a spot where community contributors can help out. I intentionally implemented one of each "kind" of operation, so the remaining work all has a template to base the work off of. Hopefully I'll be able to share more soon about followup work here. -Nathan On Sun, Nov 1, 2026 at 6:45 PM Nathan <[email protected]> wrote: > Hi all, > > I'm writing to propose accepting my ByteStringDType NEP, with the > intention of including it as a new feature in NumPy 2.6. > > The latest NEP text is here: > https://numpy.org/neps/nep-0058-bytestring-dtype.html > > The mailing list thread discussing the NEP is here: > https://mail.python.org/archives/list/[email protected]/thread/O4BIZE4YIYAS2SYOMXIENVS7BP2NNNWI/ > > I don't think there are any remaining substantive discussion points. Joren > was worried about the original proposal to make the scalar type be a Python > bytes. The latest version as a new NumPy vbytes scalar because subtyping > bytes is much easier than subtyping str and trying to use it to represent > UTF-8 data. > > Joren was also worried about the typing difficulties inherent with > StringDType and ByteStringDType's missing data support. I argued that > limitations of the type system shouldn't limit runtime behavior of NumPy's > features and that it's probably worth expanding the type system to support > behavior keyed to floating point values like nan now that there is a > concrete use-case in NumPy. I've spoken to Joren and I think he's fine with > the current text and ByteStringDType prototype. > > The prototype currently lives in a draft PR ( > https://github.com/numpy/numpy/pull/32772) which I plan to mark as ready > to merge next week. I'm also hoping we can merge > https://github.com/numpy/numpy/pull/32757, which deprecates implicit > coercion of bytes to strings (e.g. np.array(["a", b"b"])). It provides > shared machinery for dealing with this, which will let me avoid adding a > bunch of special cases for ByteStringDType. > > If there are no substantive objections within 7 days from this email, then > the NEP will be accepted; see NEP 0 for more details. > > Thanks for your time and consideration, > > -Nathan >
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