pythonnumpyscipywindows64

Installing NumPy and SciPy on 64-bit Windows (with Pip)


I found out that it's impossible to install NumPy/SciPy via installers on Windows 64-bit, that's only possible on 32-bit. Because I need more memory than a 32-bit installation gives me, I need the 64-bit version of everything.

I tried to install everything via Pip and most things worked. But when I came to SciPy, it complained about missing a Fortran compiler. So I installed Fortran via MinGW/MSYS. But you can't install SciPy right away after that, you need to reinstall NumPy. So I tried that, but now it doesn't work anymore via Pip nor via easy_install. Both give these errors:

What is the correct way to install the 64-bit versions NumPy and SciPy on a 64-bit Windows machine? Did I miss anything? Do I need to specify something somewhere? There is no information for Windows on these problems that I can find, only for Linux or Mac OS X, but they don't help me as I can't use their commands.


Solution

  • EDIT: The Numpy project now provides pre-compiled packages in the wheel format (package format enabling compiled code as binary in packages), so the installation is now as easy as with other packages.


    Numpy (as also some other packages like Scipy, Pandas etc.) includes lot's of C-, Cython, and Fortran code that needs to be compiled properly, before you can use it. This is, btw, also the reason why these Python-packages provide such fast Linear Algebra.

    To get precompiled packages for Windows, have a look at Gohlke's Unofficial Windows Binaries or use a distribution like Winpython (just works) or Anaconda (more complex) which provide an entire preconfigured environment with lots of packages from the scientific python stack.