Changes in this release:
- Compatibility with Python 2.7 has been added (3, 19)
- The c-blosc library will now be compiled with AVX2 enabled if CPU support is detected (4, 20)
- The persistence format is now documented (5)
- The format used to store configuration metadata for a persistent array has been changed to use JSON (6, 14)
- The bitshuffle filter now works for arrays with single byte dtypes (10)
- Arrays can now have user-defined metadata ("attributes") associated (11, 18)
- The c-blosc library has been upgraded to version 1.8.1 (12)
- Additional top-level functions empty_like, zeros_like, ones_like, full_like, open_like have been added (13, 17)
- The c-blosc library can now be used in either contextual mode (best when using zarr in a multi-threaded context) or non-contextual (a.k.a. global) mode (best when using zarr in a single-threaded context, because it allows c-blosc to use multiple threads internally), switched via the `zarr.set_blosc_options()` function (15, 16)