Zarr-Python: roadmap after 3.1

[jhamman]

I gave this presentation at SciPy last week on the progress Zarr-Python has made over the last year. tldr; we've come a long way!

I also shared a potential feature list that I think could form the beginning of the roadmap beyond version 3.1 (which landed today!).

Targets for Zarr 3.2 and beyond

• Performance tuning (sharding, codec-pipeline, async+multi-threading)
• Additional array-types (e.g. sparse) and data-types (e.g. ml-dtypes)
• New Extensions
  • Variable length chunk grids
  • Sparse arrays
• GPU support
  • On-GPU (de)compression
  • Other hardware (Apple, MLX)

Curious to get the input from others on what else we're looking to work on next.

A nice outcome from this discussion would be an update to the Zarr-Python Roadmap which is now nicely out of date: https://zarr.readthedocs.io/en/stable/developers/roadmap.html

cc @zarr-developers/python-core-devs, @zarr-developers/python-emeritus

[dstansby]

Adding read/write permissions to arrays & groups would be a good one to add, which I have as a work in progress.