hello, We have been discussing the creation of a minimalist C-based data interface for applications to exchange Arrow columnar data structures with each other. Some notable features of this interface include:
* A small amount of header-only C code can be copied into downstream applications, no external dependencies are needed (notable, it is not required to use Flatbuffers, though there are trade-offs resulting from this) * Low development investment (in other words: limited-scope use cases can be accomplished with little code). Enable C libraries to export Arrow columnar data at C call sites with minimal code This "C Data Interface" serves different use cases from the language-independent IPC protocol and trades away a number of features (such as forward/backward compatibility) in the interest of minimalism / simplicity. It is not a replacement for the IPC protocol and will only be used to interchange in-process data at C call sites. The PR providing the specification is here https://github.com/apache/arrow/pull/5442 A fairly comprehensive C++ implementation of this demonstrating its use is found here https://github.com/apache/arrow/pull/5608 (note that other applications implementing the interface may choose to only support a few features and thus have far less code to write) Please vote to adopt the SPECIFICATION (GitHub PR #5442). This vote will be open for at least 72 hours [ ] +1 Adopt C Data Interface specification [ ] +0 [ ] -1 Do not adopt because... Thank you
