I personally ran into this issue while working on StringDType back when it was still a prototype outside the NumPy repo. I wanted to add support for casting to and from all of the built-in datatypes. But to cast to and from float16, I had to link against libnpymath. This added a bunch of build complexity for something that works out of the box for all the other DTypes.
In that case I didn’t care about speed so much as feature-completeness. On Mon, Nov 24, 2025 at 11:37 AM Amelia Thurdekoos < [email protected]> 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 of it completely because it is obsolete?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. > > - 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] >
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