[nerdponx]

As a more or less daily user, I was surprised at how not-breaking the 2.0 changes will be for 90% of Numpy users. Unless their dependencies/environments break, I expect that casual users won't even notice the upgrade.

Even the new string dtype I expect would go unnoticed by half of users or more, because they won't be using it (because Numpy historically only had fixed-length strings and generally poor support for them) and so won't even think to try it. Pandas meanwhile has had a proper string dtype for a while, so anyone interested in doing serious work on strings in data frames / arrays would presumably be using Pandas anyway.

Most of the breaking changes are in long-deprecated oddball functions that I literally have never seen used in the wild, and in the internal parts that will be a headache for library developers.

The only change that a casual user might actually notice is the change in repr(np.float64(3.0)), from "3.0" to "np.float64(3.0)".

[cozzyd]

I suspect the C ABI break to be the biggest issue, though maybe fewer packages than I imagine compile against the numpy C ABI...