lord opened a new issue, #36494: URL: https://github.com/apache/arrow/issues/36494
### Describe the usage question you have. Please include as many useful details as possible. On [this page](https://arrow.apache.org/docs/format/CDataInterface.html#the-arrowarray-structure), the docs say that there's only two situations that a buffer may be null: > 1. for the null bitmap buffer, if ArrowArray.null_count is 0; > 2. for any buffer, if the size in bytes of the corresponding buffer would be 0. On the topic of offset buffers, [this page](https://arrow.apache.org/docs/format/Columnar.html#array-lengths) says > The offsets buffer contains length + 1 signed integers Given that `length`s are non-negative, these two facts together would imply that offset buffers are never null, since they should always contain at minimum 1 signed integer, which does not have a size in bytes of 0. In practice, I see null offset buffers in the C++ library. It feels like the documentation should be updated here, and I'm happy to submit a PR to do so, but I guess I'm curious what a null offset buffer even means, and I couldn't find docs that explicitly state its meaning. I would guess an offset buffer be null only if it would contain only a single `0`. But could it also be null if it would contain many `0`s? ### Component(s) Documentation -- This is an automated message from the Apache Git Service. To respond to the message, please log on to GitHub and use the URL above to go to the specific comment. To unsubscribe, e-mail: [email protected] For queries about this service, please contact Infrastructure at: [email protected]
