Make NumPy an optional dependency perhaps?

[carterbox]

Would it be possible to make numpy an optional dependency for cuda.core? For example, if you just want to use cuda.core to query system device properties, installing a BLAS implementation is a bit heavy.

[kkraus14]

+1 it looks like our numpy usage outside of tests, benchmarks, and examples is only related to dtypes where we should be able to make it handle numpy dtypes optionally

[leofang]

Very unlikely. We use NumPy heavily in cuda-core (and nvmath-python and the upstream Numba):
https://github.com/search?q=repo%3ANVIDIA%2Fcuda-python+numpy+path%3Acuda_core%2Fcuda&type=code
Without assuming NumPy exists it is really challenging to write interoperable code. We'd end up reinventing a whole set of infra as done in mpi4py. In a modern workload NumPy always exists somewhere, so I don't get where this is coming from?

[leofang]

FWIW we don't even set a version constraint on NumPy as suggested by NEP 29/Spec 0, only that it exists in the user env:

cuda-python/cuda_core/pyproject.toml

Lines 45 to 47 in f903d98

	dependencies = [
	"numpy",
	]

, so this is pretty relaxing.

[leofang]

Unless there is a compelling reason let's close this for now.