arrow-rs

Some community members also use the Arrow Rust Discord Server and the official ASF Slack server for informal discussions and coordination. This is a great place to meet other contributors and get guidance on where to contribute. However, all technical designs should also be recorded and formalized in GitHub issues, so that they are accessible to everyone. In Slack, find us in the #arrow-rust channel and feel free to ask for an invite via Discord, GitHub issues, or other means.

There is more information in the contributing guide and the security policy.

Repository Structure

This repository contains the following crates:

The current development version the API documentation can be found here.

Note: previously the object_store crate was also part of this repository, but it has been moved to the arrow-rs-object-store repository

Release Versioning and Schedule

The Arrow Rust project releases approximately monthly and follows Semantic Versioning.

Due to available maintainer and testing bandwidth, arrow crates (arrow, arrow-flight, etc.) are released on the same schedule with the same versions as the parquet and parquet_derive crates.

This crate releases every month. We release new major versions (with potentially breaking API changes) at most once a quarter, and release incremental minor versions in the intervening months. See ticket #5368 for more details.

To keep our maintenance burden down, we do regularly scheduled releases (major and minor) from the main branch. How we handle PRs with breaking API changes is described in the contributing guide.

Planned Release Schedule

Rust Version Compatibility Policy

arrow-rs and parquet are built and tested with stable Rust, and will keep a rolling MSRV (minimum supported Rust version) that can only be updated in major releases on an as needed basis (e.g. project dependencies bump their MSRV or a particular Rust feature is useful for us etc.). The new MSRV if selected will be at least 6 months old. The minor releases are guaranteed to have the same MSRV.

Note: If a Rust hotfix is released for the current MSRV, the MSRV will be updated to the specific minor version that includes all applicable hotfixes preceding other policies.

Platform Support

Only little-endian platforms are officially supported and tested in CI. Big-endian platforms are not tested in CI and may not work correctly. Fixes for big-endian platforms are welcome and handled on a best-effort basis, but compatibility is not guaranteed.

Guidelines for panic vs Result

In general, use panics for bad states that are unreachable, unrecoverable or harmful. For those caused by invalid user input, however, we prefer to report that invalidity gracefully as an error result instead of panicking. In general, invalid input should result in an Error as soon as possible. It is ok for code paths after validation to assume validation has already occurred and panic if not. See ticket #6737 for more nuances.

Deprecation Guidelines

Minor releases may deprecate, but not remove APIs. Deprecating APIs allows downstream Rust programs to still compile, but generate compiler warnings. This gives downstream crates time to migrate prior to API removal.

To deprecate an API:

• Mark the API as deprecated using #[deprecated] and specify the exact arrow-rs version in which it was deprecated
• Concisely describe the preferred API to help the user transition

The deprecated version is the next version which will be released (please consult the list above). To mark the API as deprecated, use the #[deprecated(since = "...", note = "...")] attribute.

For example

#[deprecated(since = "51.0.0", note = "Use `date_part` instead")]

In general, deprecated APIs will remain in the codebase for at least two major releases after they were deprecated (typically between 6 - 9 months later). For example, an API deprecated in 51.3.0 can be removed in 54.0.0 (or later). Deprecated APIs may be removed earlier or later than these guidelines at the discretion of the maintainers.

Related Projects

There are several related crates in different repositories

Collectively, these crates support a wider array of functionality for analytic computations in Rust.

For example, you can write SQL queries or a DataFrame (using the datafusion crate) to read a parquet file (using the parquet crate), evaluate it in-memory using Arrow's columnar format (using the arrow crate), and send to another process (using the arrow-flight crate).

Generally speaking, the arrow crate offers functionality for using Arrow arrays, and datafusion offers most operations typically found in SQL, including joins and window functions.

You can find more details about each crate in their respective READMEs.