+1 to what Weston and Joris suggested regarding the name. "ListView" seems like the best name to use for this layout in Arrow.
My understanding is that the primary benefit of this ListView layout over Arrow's existing List layouts [1] is that ListView allows for buffer alignment [2] without padding, which makes vectorized processing much more efficient. Is this understanding correct? [1] https://arrow.apache.org/docs/format/Columnar.html#variable-size-list-layout [2] https://arrow.apache.org/docs/format/Columnar.html#buffer-alignment-and-padding Ian On Wed, Apr 26, 2023 at 5:27 AM Joris Van den Bossche <jorisvandenboss...@gmail.com> wrote: > > On Wed, 26 Apr 2023 at 02:37, Weston Pace <weston.p...@gmail.com> wrote: > > > > For context, there was some discussion on this back in [1]. At that time > > this was called "sequence view" but I do not like that name. However, > > array-view array is a little confusing. Given this is similar to list can > > we go with list-view array? > > Yes, given that this is essentially an alternative representation of a > logical "list" array, I would also prefer that we use the term "list" > in the name for such a new type. The word "array" has a different > meaning in context of our columnar specification.
