As I noted on the pull request, I think fundamentally this work is at odds with the Arrow specification and being used to introduce a shadow specification.
I don't think our intentions about how people should use something really influence how people will actually use or perceive it. They'll just find supported Arrow code and expose things based on it and call it "Arrow compatible". In other words, I don't think people in the outside world will be able to perceive the distinction between "Arrow C++ compatible" and "Arrow compatible". On Mon, Jan 20, 2020 at 9:28 AM Wes McKinney <wesmck...@gmail.com> wrote: > hi folks, > > I just made a comment in https://github.com/apache/arrow/pull/6026 > that I wanted to surface here on the mailing list. > > It seems that to reach consensus for a C interface that is intended to > be broadly used by multiple programming languages, we may make some > compromises that harm or outright undermine some of the use cases that > motivated the creation of the C interface in the first place. That > does not seem good. I wonder if it would be more productive to reduce > the scope of the project to merely providing a C-header-based data > interface to the C++ project only. That was the original problem > statement and it seems in attempting to make it useful beyond C++ has > made it difficult to reach consensus. > > Thanks > Wes > > On Sat, Dec 21, 2019 at 4:38 PM Jacques Nadeau <jacq...@apache.org> wrote: > > > > Thanks for addressing my comments. I'm actively reviewing the proposal. > It > > is taking me more time than I would like given the time of the year but I > > want to make sure that you know that I'm looking at it and hope to > provide > > additional feedback beyond that which I've provided thus far on the PR. > > Will update soon. > > > > Thanks for your patience. > > > > On Tue, Dec 17, 2019 at 11:16 AM Antoine Pitrou <solip...@pitrou.net> > wrote: > > > > > > > > Hello, > > > > > > Following Jacques's feedback, I drafted a new version of the C data > > > interface spec. > > > > > > The spec PR is here: > > > https://github.com/apache/arrow/pull/6040 > > > Direct link to the RST file: > > > > > > > https://github.com/apache/arrow/blob/5d8669d371401f9db12326b079e13c0058ba972b/docs/source/format/CDataInterface.rst > > > > > > There is also a C++ implementation, together with a Python <-> R > > > bridge demonstrating the functionality: > > > https://github.com/apache/arrow/pull/6026 > > > > > > The main change from the previous spec is that there are now two C > > > structures; one for the type or schema information, one for the > > > array or record batch data. This allows exchanging both kinds of > > > information independently (and so, potentially, to exchange schema once > > > and then multiple arrays or record batches). > > > > > > Comments and questions welcome. > > > > > > Regards > > > > > > Antoine. > > > > > > > > > >
