[ARROW-3896] [MATLAB] Decouple MATLAB-Arrow conversion logic from Feather file specific logic

• Type: Improvement
• Status: Open
• Priority: Major
• Resolution: Unresolved
• Component/s: MATLAB
• External issue URL: https://github.com/apache/arrow/issues/20506
• Assignee: Unassigned
• Reporter: Kevin Gurney
• Created: 28/Nov/18 21:01
• Updated: 11/Jan/23 07:30

Description

Currently, the logic for converting between a MATLAB mxArray and various Arrow data structures (arrow::Table, arrow::Array, etc.) is tightly coupled and fairly tangled up with the logic specific to handling Feather files. It would be helpful to factor out these conversions into a more generic "mlarrow" conversion layer component so that it can be reused in the future for use cases other than Feather support. Furthermore, this would be helpful to enforce a cleaner separation of concerns.

It would be nice to start off with this refactoring work up front before adding support for more datatypes to the MATLAB featherread/featherwrite functions, so that we can start off with a clean base upon which to expand moving forward.