Hello all, I'm in the progress of changing the implementation of the Take kernel to work on ChunkedArrays without concatenating them into a single Array first. While working on the implementation, I realised that we switch often between Datum and the specific-typed parameters. This works quite well for the combination of Array& and Datum(shared_ptr<ArrayData>) as here the reference object with type Array& always carries a shared reference with it, so switching between Array& and its Datum is quite easy.
In contrast, we cannot do this with ChunkedArrays as here the Datum requires a shared_ptr<ChunkedArray> which cannot be constructed from the reference type. Thus to allow interfaces like `Status Take(FunctionContext* ctx, const ChunkedArray& values, const Array& indices,` to pass successfully their arguments to the Kernel implementation, we have to do: a) Remove the references from the interface of the Take() function and use `shared_ptr` instances everywhere. b) Add interfaces to kernels like the TakeKernel that allow calling with specific references instead of Datum instances Personally I would prefer b) as this allow us to make more use of the C++ type system and would also avoid the shared_ptr overhead where not necessary. Cheers, Uwe
