DOC: Add release notes for 0-size dtypes

1 files changed, 17 insertions, 0 deletions

diff --git a/doc/release/1.14.0-notes.rst b/doc/release/1.14.0-notes.rst
index 624886eb1..a4b61e038 100644
--- a/doc/release/1.14.0-notes.rst
+++ b/doc/release/1.14.0-notes.rst
@@ -247,6 +247,23 @@ common cache line size.  This makes ``npy`` files easier to use in
 programs which open them with ``mmap``, especially on Linux where an
 ``mmap`` offset must be a multiple of the page size.
 
+Better support for empty structured and string types
+----------------------------------------------------
+Structured types can contain zero fields, and string dtypes can contain zero
+characters. Zero-length strings still cannot be created directly, and must be
+constructed through structured dtypes:
+
+    str0 = np.empty(10, np.dtype([('v', str, N)]))['v']
+    void0 = np.empty(10, np.void)
+
+It was always possible to work with these, but the following operations are
+now supported for these arrays:
+
+ * `arr.sort()`
+ * `arr.view(bytes)`
+ * `arr.resize(...)`
+ * `pickle.dumps(arr)`
+
 
 Changes
 =======