Release Notes

Version 0.12.1

This version fixed many regressions reported by user for the 0.12 release. This release contains a new loop-lifting mechanism that specializes certains loop patterns for nopython mode compilation. This avoid direct support for heap-allocating and other very dynamic operations.

Improvements:

• Add loop-lifting–jit-ing loops in nopython for object mode code. This allows functions to allocate NumPy arrays and use Python objects, while the tight loops in the function can still be compiled in nopython mode. Any arrays that the tight loop uses should be created before the loop is entered.

Fixes:

• Add support for majority of “math” module functions
• Fix for...else handling
• Add support for builtin round()
• Fix tenary if...else support
• Revive “numba” script
• Fix problems with some boolean expressions
• Add support for more NumPy ufuncs

Version 0.12

Version 0.12 contains a big refactor of the compiler. The main objective for this refactor was to simplify the code base to create a better foundation for further work. A secondary objective was to improve the worst case performance to ensure that compiled functions in object mode never run slower than pure Python code (this was a problem in several cases with the old code base). This refactor is still a work in progress and further testing is needed.

Main improvements:

• Major refactor of compiler for performance and maintenance reasons
• Better fallback to object mode when native mode fails
• Improved worst case performance in object mode

The public interface of numba has been slightly changed. The idea is to make it cleaner and more rational:

• jit decorator has been modified, so that it can be called without a signature. When called without a signature, it behaves as the old autojit. Autojit has been deprecated in favour of this approach.
• Jitted functions can now be overloaded.
• Added a “njit” decorator that behaves like “jit” decorator with nopython=True.
• The numba.vectorize namespace is gone. The vectorize decorator will be in the main numba namespace.
• Added a guvectorize decorator in the main numba namespace. It is similiar to numba.vectorize, but takes a dimension signature. It generates gufuncs. This is a replacement for the GUVectorize gufunc factory which has been deprecated.

Main regressions (will be fixed in a future release):

• Creating new NumPy arrays is not supported in nopython mode
• Returning NumPy arrays is not supported in nopython mode
• NumPy array slicing is not supported in nopython mode
• lists and tuples are not supported in nopython mode
• string, datetime, cdecimal, and struct types are not implemented yet
• Extension types (classes) are not supported in nopython mode
• Closures are not supported
• Raise keyword is not supported
• Recursion is not support in nopython mode

Version 0.11

• Experimental support for NumPy datetime type

Version 0.10

• Annotation tool (./bin/numba –annotate –fancy) (thanks to Jay Bourque)
• Open sourced prange
• Support for raise statement
• Pluggable array representation
• Support for enumerate and zip (thanks to Eugene Toder)
• Better string formatting support (thanks to Eugene Toder)
• Builtins min(), max() and bool() (thanks to Eugene Toder)
• Fix some code reloading issues (thanks to Björn Linse)
• Recognize NumPy scalar objects (thanks to Björn Linse)

Version 0.9

• Improved math support
• Open sourced generalized ufuncs
• Improved array expressions

Version 0.8

• Support for autojit classes

  • Inheritance not yet supported

• Python 3 support for pycc

• Allow retrieval of ctypes function wrapper

  • And hence support retrieval of a pointer to the function

• Fixed a memory leak of array slicing views

Version 0.7.2

• Official Python 3 support (python 3.2 and 3.3)
• Support for intrinsics and instructions
• Various bug fixes (see https://github.com/numba/numba/issues?milestone=7&state=closed)

Version 0.7.1

• Various bug fixes

Version 0.7

• Open sourced single-threaded ufunc vectorizer

• Open sourced NumPy array expression compilation

• Open sourced fast NumPy array slicing

• Experimental Python 3 support

• Support for typed containers

  • typed lists and tuples

• Support for iteration over objects

• Support object comparisons

• Preliminary CFFI support

  • Jit calls to CFFI functions (passed into autojit functions)
  • TODO: Recognize ffi_lib.my_func attributes

• Improved support for ctypes

• Allow declaring extension attribute types as through class attributes

• Support for type casting in Python

  • Get the same semantics with or without numba compilation

• Support for recursion

  • For jit methods and extension classes

• Allow jit functions as C callbacks

• Friendlier error reporting

• Internal improvements

• A variety of bug fixes

Version 0.6.1

• Support for bitwise operations

Version 0.6

• Python 2.6 support

• Programmable typing

  • Allow users to add type inference for external code

• Better NumPy type inference

  • outer, inner, dot, vdot, tensordot, nonzero, where, binary ufuncs + methods (reduce, accumulate, reduceat, outer)

• Type based alias analysis

  • Support for strict aliasing

• Much faster autojit dispatch when calling from Python

• Faster numerical loops through data and stride pre-loading

• Integral overflow and underflow checking for conversions from objects

• Make Meta dependency optional

Version 0.5

• SSA-based type inference

  • Allows variable reuse
  • Allow referring to variables before lexical definition

• Support multiple comparisons

• Support for template types

• List comprehensions

• Support for pointers

• Many bug fixes

• Added user documentation

Version 0.4

Version 0.3.2

• Add support for object arithmetic (issue 56).
• Bug fixes (issue 55).

Version 0.3

• Changed default compilation approach to ast
• Added support for cross-module linking
• Added support for closures (can jit inner functions and return them) (see examples/closure.py)
• Added support for dtype structures (can access elements of structure with attribute access) (see examples/structures.py)
• Added support for extension types (numba classes) (see examples/numbaclasses.py)
• Added support for general Python code (use nopython to raise an error if Python C-API is used to avoid unexpected slowness because of lack of implementation defaulting to generic Python)
• Fixed many bugs
• Added support to detect math operations.
• Added with python and with nopython contexts
• Added more examples

Many features need to be documented still. Look at examples and tests for more information.

Version 0.2

• Added an ast approach to compilation
• Removed d, f, i, b from numba namespace (use f8, f4, i4, b1)
• Changed function to autojit2
• Added autojit function to decorate calls to the function and use types of the variable to create compiled versions.
• changed keyword arguments to jit and autojit functions to restype and argtypes to be consistent with ctypes module.
• Added pycc – a python to shared library compiler