RFC: add support for determining the size of arrays in bytes

Open
#789 3 comments 0 reactions 0 assignees View on GitHub

Nobody has claimed this yet.

Assessment

Difficulty
5/5
Estimated time
Over a week
Newbie friendliness
30/100
Issue type
Feature
Clarity
Needs clarification
Activity status
Stale
Tech stack
numpy, python
Domain
data

Research direction

The issue names no repository files or tests. Start by reviewing the RFC discussion and the described xarray workaround using finfo, iinfo, boolean sizing, and arr.size. Done means reaching a settled array API decision on whether to add arr.nbytes, dtype.itemsize, or both, with the scope and compatibility requirements documented.

Written by the indexing model from the issue text.

Description

API extension Needs Discussion RFC

In trying to adapt xarray to numpy>=2 (and thus switching testing code from numpy.array_api to array-api-strict), I noticed that the array API does not require the nbytes property on arrays, nor the itemsize property on dtypes.

Thus, the only way to figure out the size of an array we could find was to create a function that dispatches to finfo / iinfo (and returns a hard-coded 1 byte for booleans), then use that and arr.size to compute the size of the array. This feels like more work than should be necessary, so I wonder if you would be open to extending the array API with arr.nbytes or arr.dtype.itemsize (or both)?

Dominant language
Python
Stars
281
Forks
52
No merged PRs in 30d

Contributor guide

Open the contributing guide

First steps

  1. Read the whole issue, then the project's contributing guide.
  2. Comment on the issue to say you are picking it up — it saves two people doing the same work.
  3. Fork the repository and make your change on a branch.
  4. Open a pull request that references the issue number.

More from data-apis/array-api

All issues in data-apis/array-api

Similar issues

More Python issues

Get new issues in your inbox

A short digest of beginner-friendly GitHub issues.