Didn’t want to follow up on this on the Jira issue earlier since it's sort of tangential to that bug and more of a usage question. You said:
> I wouldn't recommend building applications based on them nowadays since the > level of support / compatibility in other projects is low. In my case, I am using them since it seemed like a straightforward representation of my data that has nulls, the format I’m converting from has zero cost numpy representations, and converting from an internal format into Arrow in memory structures appears zero cost (or close to it) as well. I guess I can just provide the mask as an explicit argument, but my original desire to use it came from being able to exploit numpy.ma.concatenate in a way that saved some complexity in implementation. Since Arrow itself supports masking values with a bitfield, is there something intrinsic to the notion of array masks that is not well supported? Or do you just mean the specific numpy MaskedArray class? If this is too much of a numpy question rather than an arrow question, could you point me to where I can read up on masked array support or maybe what the right place to ask the numpy community about whether what I'm doing is appropriate or not. Thanks, -Dan Nugent
