Introduction
Not a lot of people working with the Python scientific ecosystem are aware of the NEP 18 (dispatch mechanism for NumPy’s high-level array functions). Given the importance of this protocol, I decided to write this short introduction to the new dispatcher that will certainly bring a lot of benefits for the Python scientific ecosystem.
If you used PyTorch, TensorFlow, Dask, etc, you certainly noticed the similarity of their API contracts with Numpy. And it’s not by accident, Numpy’s API is one of the most fundamental and widely-used APIs for scientific computing. Numpy is so pervasive, that it ceased to be only an API and it is becoming more a protocol or an API specification.