dask-awkward VS Apache Arrow

Hi! I'm the original author of Awkward Array (Jim Pivarski), though there are now many contributors with about five regulars. Two of my colleagues just pointed me here—I'm glad you're interested! I can answer any questions you have about it.

First, sorry about all the TODOs in the documentation: I laid out a table of contents structure as a reminder to myself of what ought to be written, but haven't had a chance to fill in all of the topics. From the front page (https://awkward-array.org/), if you click through to the Python API reference (https://awkward-array.readthedocs.io/), that site is 100% filled in. Like NumPy, the library consists of one basic data type, `ak.Array`, and a suite of functions that act on it, `ak.this` and `ak.that`. All of those functions are individually documented, and many have examples.

The basic idea starts with a data structure like Apache Arrow (https://arrow.apache.org/)—a tree of general, variable-length types, organized in memory as a collection of columnar arrays—but performs operations on the data without ever taking it out of its columnar form. (3.5 minute explanation here: https://youtu.be/2NxWpU7NArk?t=661) Those columnar operations are compiled (in C++); there's a core of structure-manipulation functions suggestively named "cpu-kernels" that will also be implemented in CUDA (some already have, but that's in an experimental stage).

A key aspect of this is that structure can be manipulated just by changing values in some internal arrays and rearranging the single tree organizing those arrays. If, for instance, you want to replace a bunch of objects in variable-length lists with another structure, it never needs to instantiate those objects or lists as explicit types (e.g. `struct` or `std::vector`), and so the functions don't need to be compiled for specific data types. You can define any new data types at runtime and the same compiled functions apply. Therefore, JIT compilation is not necessary.

We do have Numba extensions so that you can iterate over runtime-defined data types in JIT-compiled Numba, but that's a second way to manipulate the same data. By analogy with NumPy, you can compute many things using NumPy's precompiled functions, as long as you express your workflow in NumPy's vectorized way. Numba additionally allows you to express your workflow in imperative loops without losing performance. It's the same way with Awkward Array: unpacking a million record structures or slicing a million variable-length lists in a single function call makes use of some precompiled functions (no JIT), but iterating over them at scale with imperative for loops requires JIT-compilation in Numba.

Just as we work with Numba to provide both of these programming styles—array-oriented and imperative—we'll also be working with JAX to add autodifferentiation (Anish Biswas will be starting on this in January; he's actually continuing work from last spring, but in a different direction). We're also working with Martin Durant and Doug Davis to replace our homegrown lazy arrays with industry-standard Dask, as a new collection type (https://github.com/ContinuumIO/dask-awkward/). A lot of my time, with Ianna Osborne and Ioana Ifrim at my university, is being spent refactoring the internals to make these kinds of integrations easier (https://indico.cern.ch/event/855454/contributions/4605044/). We found that we had implemented too much in C++ and need more, but not all, of the code to be in Python to be able to interact with third-party libraries.

If you have any other questions, I'd be happy to answer them!

In comes Polars: a brand new dataframe library, or how the author Ritchie Vink describes it... a query engine with a dataframe frontend. Polars is built on top of the Arrow memory format and is written in Rust, which is a modern performant and memory-safe systems programming language similar to C/C++.

I learned yesterday about GoLang's assembler https://go.dev/doc/asm - after browsing how arrow is implemented for different languages (my experience is mainly C/C++) - https://github.com/apache/arrow/tree/main/go/arrow/math - there are bunch of .S ("asm" files) and I'm still not able to comprehend how these work exactly (I guess it'll take more reading) - it seems very peculiar.

The last time I've used inlined assembly was back in Turbo/Borland Pascal, then bit in Visual Studio (32-bit), until they got disabled. Then did very little gcc with their more strict specification (while the former you had to know how the ABI worked, the latter too - but it was specced out).

Anyway - I wasn't expecting to find this in "Go" :) But I guess you can always start with .go code then produce assembly (-S) then optimize it, or find/hire someone to do it.

One is related to the heritage of being built around the NumPy library, which is great for processing numerical data, but becomes an issue as soon as the data is anything else. Pandas 2.0 has started to bring in Arrow, but it's not yet the standard (you have to opt-in and according to the developers it's going to stay that way for the foreseeable future). Also, pandas's Arrow-based features are not yet entirely on par with its NumPy-based features. Polars was built around Arrow from the get go. This makes it very powerful when it comes to exchanging data with other languages and reducing the number of in-memory copying operations, thus leading to better performance.

IMO a good first step would be to use the txr FFI to write a library for Apache arrow: https://arrow.apache.org/

https://www.reddit.com/r/O3DE/comments/rdvxhx/why_python/ :

> Python is used for scripting the editor only, not in-game behaviors.

> For implementing entity behaviors the only out of box ways are C++, ScriptCanvas (visual scripting) or Lua. Python is currently not available for implementing game logic.

C++, Lua, and Python all implement CFFI (C Foreign Function Interface) for remote function and method calls.

"Using CFFI for embedding" https://cffi.readthedocs.io/en/latest/embedding.html :

> You can use CFFI to generate C code which exports the API of your choice to any C application that wants to link with this C code. This API, which you define yourself, ends up as the API of a .so/.dll/.dylib library—or you can statically link it within a larger application.

Apache Arrow already supports C, C++, Python, Rust, Go and has C GLib support Lua:

https://github.com/apache/arrow/tree/main/c_glib/example/lua :

> Arrow Lua example: All example codes use LGI to use Arrow GLib based bindings

pyarrow.from_numpy_dtype:

AWS Data Wrangler is a Python library that simplifies the process of interacting with various AWS services, built on top of some useful data tools and open-source projects such as Pandas, Apache Arrow and Boto3. It offers streamlined functions to connect to, retrieve, transform, and load data from AWS services, with a strong focus on Amazon S3.

Worker should really adopt Apache Arrow, which has a much bigger ecosystem.

https://github.com/apache/arrow

Apache Arrow

I am aware of the fact that there are other posts about this issue but none of the ideas to solve it worked for me or sometimes none were found. The issue was discussed in the wheel git hub last December and seems to be solved but then it seems like I'm installing the wrong version? I simply used pip3 install pyarrow, is that wrong?