Frequently Asked Questions

Roadmap

Should this be merged into pandas one day?

Yes, we definitely want to have parts of fletcher as part of pandas. There are plans for a native string type and a list type where Apache Arrow would be the preferable data structure.

If this is merged into pandas, is there still a need for fletcher?

Definitely! fletcher functions as glue for all available types in Apache Arrow as pandas.ExtensionDtype. Only a subset of these types will make its way into pandas, thus the string functions that return a boolean result in pandas will return a pandas.BooleanArray (bytemask-backed numpy array) whereas the ones in fletcher will keep returning a fletcher.FletcherBaseArray (bitmask-backed Arrow array).

Furthermore, an additional goal of fletcher is to support working with numba on top of pyarrow.Array structures. These utilities will not make their way into pandas as there we don’t wont to introduce a hard numba dependency.

Development