[Numpy-discussion] Disallow Accelerate as a LAPACK backend for NumPy

[Ralf Gommers]

On Fri, Nov 15, 2019 at 5:27 AM Matti Picus <matti.picus at gmail.com> wrote:

>     On Tue, Nov 12, 2019 at 12:41 AM Matti Picus <matti.picus at gmail.com>
>     wrote:
>
>     Apple has dropped support for Accelerate. It has bugs that have not
> been
>     fixed, and is closed source so we cannot fix them ourselves. We have
>     been getting a handful of reports from users who end up building NumPy
>     on macOS, and inadvertently link to Accelerate, then end up with wrong
>     linalg results. In PR 14880https://github.com/numpy/numpy/pull/14880
> I
>     propose to disallow finding it when building NumPy. At this time it
> will
>     remain in distutils as one of the backends to support users, but how do
>     people feel about a future PR to totally remove it?
>
> Someone pointed out that Apple has not officially dropped support as far
> as it can be determined. Sorry for the bad information. However, I still
> stand by the "has bugs that have not been fixed, and is closed source". An
> alternative to dropping automatic support for it would be to find a channel
> for engaging with Apple to report and fix the bugs.
>

That's been tried, repeatedly. I would suggest not to spend time on that.
Apple knows, they have just decided it's not important to them.

Spending time on contributing to either OpenBLAS or BLIS/libFLAME seems
like a more useful activity.

Cheers,
Ralf
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