[ARROW-1011] [Format] Clarify requirements around buffer padding in validity bitmaps

• Type: New Feature
• Status: Resolved
• Priority: Major
• Resolution: Fixed
• Fix Version/s: 0.4.0
• Component/s: Format
• External issue URL: https://github.com/apache/arrow/issues/16606
• Assignee: Wenchen Fan
• Reporter: Wes McKinney
• Created: 11/May/17 21:14
• Updated: 11/Jan/23 07:12
• Resolved: 14/May/17 01:28

Description

This has come up in https://github.com/apache/arrow/pull/673 and in prior discussions.

The basic summary is that we should not write non-zero padding bytes in IPC messages. However: one cannot in general rely on the padding being non-zero when the data is in memory (for example: zero-copy slices of Arrow arrays/vectors).

I think it would be good to clarify this point in Layout.md – namely that what gets written to the wire should be deterministic. However, in-memory algorithms should not in general expect the padding region to have a particular value. As an example, a popcount on a validity bitmap would want to exclude padding bytes from the computation. Other elementwise SIMD operations are free to use the padding bytes as they wish, with a known caveat.

cc cloud_fan