Installation

Requirements

Specular Differentiation requires Python 3.14 or later and NumPy 2.4 or later. NumPy is installed automatically with the package and is the default backend.

Install from PyPI

Install Specular Differentiation using pip:

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pip install specular-differentiation

The package is distributed as specular-differentiation and imported in Python as specular.

The standard installation includes scaled_mean, derivative, gradient, and jacobian, as well as the scalar ODE methods and the SPEG optimizer.

Verify the installation

Import specular and check the installed package version:

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import specular

print("specular version:", specular.__version__)

Optional backends

Install the corresponding extra to use Numba or JAX:

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pip install "specular-differentiation[numba]"
pip install "specular-differentiation[jax]"

The Numba extra requires numba >= 0.65. The JAX extra requires jax >= 0.10 and jaxlib >= 0.10. pip installs these dependencies automatically.

Installing an extra makes that backend available; NumPy remains the default. See Backends for backend selection and precision settings.

Development and documentation

For development, run the following command from the root of a local checkout of the repository:

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pip install -e ".[dev]"

The editable installation uses the local source and includes both optional backends, the test dependencies, and the example tools.

Documentation tools can be installed separately from the same directory:

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pip install -e ".[docs]"