Uh oh!
There was an error while loading. Please reload this page.
Add this suggestion to a batch that can be applied as a single commit.This suggestion is invalid because no changes were made to the code.Suggestions cannot be applied while the pull request is closed.Suggestions cannot be applied while viewing a subset of changes.Only one suggestion per line can be applied in a batch.Add this suggestion to a batch that can be applied as a single commit.Applying suggestions on deleted lines is not supported.You must change the existing code in this line in order to create a valid suggestion.Outdated suggestions cannot be applied.This suggestion has been applied or marked resolved.Suggestions cannot be applied from pending reviews.Suggestions cannot be applied on multi-line comments.Suggestions cannot be applied while the pull request is queued to merge.Suggestion cannot be applied right now. Please check back later.
There was a problem hiding this comment.
Choose a reason for hiding this comment
The reason will be displayed to describe this comment to others. Learn more.
IIRC this was a deliberate choice so that one can rely upon accurate null counts using a byte-wise hardware popcount instruction. Though I'm not sure how safe that is in general since we can do:
array->Slice(0, 1)which would yield a slice of length 1, whose additional bytes should not be inspected in algorithms. In an IPC setting, the padding to byte 63 should be all zeros (see e.g. https://github.com/apache/arrow/blob/master/cpp/src/arrow/ipc/writer.cc#L220), so I think this is fine. We will want to make sure in the IPC writers that we do not write possibly unspecified in-memory bytes from the validity bitmap, instead truncating the buffer to the effective byte range and writing zero padding. It might be worth adding some language to this document about this.
Per our prior discussion about padding -- since this document is about what data gets written to stream or file format, it may be good to be more rigid about zero-ing out the padding bytes that go on the wire. This places a slight additional burden on the writers, though
There was a problem hiding this comment.
Choose a reason for hiding this comment
The reason will be displayed to describe this comment to others. Learn more.
I think ideally we only need to use zero padding for null bitmap in a word(8 bytes) boundary, which means the previous code is accurate.
However, to make the rule simpler, I think it also makes sense to require all the padding bytes to be 0 for null bitmap. This is also what we specified in the "Null bitmaps" section: