I'm writing to gauge interest in a set of helpers in C and/or C++ for reading/exporting Arrow C Data interface structures. My use-case is building Arrow geospatial support in R [1], and while the set of helpers I've been using [2] has served the purpose of me writing about the opportunities for Arrow + geospatial [3], I would like to rewrite the prototype based on something developed by/with the Arrow community.
Does a set of C/C++ helpers for Arrow C Data interface structures already exist? *Should* it exist? If it doesn't, what should the name/scope of that library be? The names 'nanoarrow', 'narrow', 'sparrow', and 'arrow-hpp' have all surfaced in my limited discussion of this so far. For the purpose of starting the discussion, I'll posit that the library should include helpers to allocate/destroy C Data interface structures, a schema metadata encoder/decoder, validation of a schema/array pair, and something like the ArrayBuilder C++ class. [1] https://lists.apache.org/thread/yb7p9wpg3k128njskhwj9j788opb67g7 [2] https://github.com/paleolimbot/geoarrow-cpp/tree/main/src/geoarrow/internal/arrow-hpp [3] https://docs.google.com/document/d/1A6e3XCerjhXVFHBDaoAlBBNFb2HG4RB9SVRpuBru7E4/edit?usp=sharing
