jorgecarleitao edited a comment on pull request #8630:
URL: https://github.com/apache/arrow/pull/8630#issuecomment-725500367
Thanks a lot, @alamb and @vertexclique . I agree with the naming issues
here, and great insight into those crates. I do not have strong feelings about
naming; I tried to be close to what I am familiar with from Rust (e.g.
`Vec::extend`).
A bit of background: @yordan-pavlov did an impressive job on #7798 to make
filtering performant; It is _really_ hard to get that performance with a
generalization. I had to re-write this code at least 3 times to get it to a
stage with comparable performance and even then, you can see that it depends on
the filter conditions. But there is a (IMO good) reason for generalizing the
code in `filter`.
Specifically, the use-case I am looking at is to remove most code from the
`take` kernel, since it is doing what this struct is doing (and what `filter`
was doing). There are implementation details that are different (`take`'s
indices can be null and `filter` does not support `ArrayStruct` atm), but they
are fundamentally doing the same thing: constructing an `ArrayData` by
memcopying chunks of another `ArrayData`.
Also, note that this goes beyond masking: it supports taking values
repeatedly. I see it as a "builder" bound to a specific `ArrayData`
(`ArrayDataBuilder` is already taken, though). It is not a builder like the
builders in `builder.rs` because those memcopy data from rust native types, not
Arrow types.
The reason this performance remains comparable(-ish) to master is that when
it binds to an `ArrayData`, it inspects its `DataType` to initialize functions
(the `type Extend`) bound to that `ArrayData` that are performant.
For example,
```rust
let values = &array.buffers()[0].data()[array.offset() * size_of::<T>()..];
Box::new(move |mutable: &mut _MutableArrayData, start: usize, len: usize| {
```
instead of
```rust
Box::new(move |mutable: &mut _MutableArrayData, array: &ArrayData, start:
usize, len: usize| {
let values = &array.buffers()[0].data()[array.offset() *
size_of::<T>()..];
```
has a meaningful performance impact because it avoids checks on both
`buffers()[0]` and `[something..]` on every call of `extend`. This check may
seem small, but it significantly impacts performance because `extend` can be as
small as: `copy 2 bits` (in the case of a boolean array). When there are many
calls of this operation (e.g. filter every other slot), these checks are as or
more expensive than the `memcopy` themselves.
There is a further boost possible that I explored but did not finish, but it
requires a bit of `unsafe` code: we know that these functions never outlive
`MutableDataArray`. Therefore, we could actually unsafely pass `&self.data` to
their initialization and avoid all costs associated with accessing
`mutable.buffers()` and the like inside `extend`. In this case, we would use
```rust
type Extend<'a> = Box<Fn(usize, usize) -> () + 'a>;
```
and bind the `_MutableArrayData` on `build_primitive_extend<'a, T>(array,
data)`. This would be the closest to the current filter implementation that
remains generic for other use-cases.
My point is that there are really non-trivial optimizations done in this
proposal that were borrowed from the excellent work from @yordan-pavlov and
that are required to keep up with very high bar set by #7798 This draft is
trying to leverage that work on two of our kernels, `take` and `filter`.
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