Minarrow - Apache Arrow Benefits without Baggage for HPC, Native Streaming, and Embedded workloads

Introduction

Welcome to Minarrow.

Minarrow is a from-scratch columnar library built for real-time and systems workloads in Rust.
It keeps the surface small, makes types explicit, compiles fast, and aligns data for predictable SIMD performance.
It speaks Arrow when you need to interchange — but the core stays lean.

Design Focus

• Typed, direct access – No downcasting chains
• Predictable performance – 64-byte alignment by default
• Fast iteration – Minimal dependencies, sub-1.5 s clean builds, <0.15 s rebuilds
• Interoperability on demand – Convert to and from Arrow at the boundary

Why This Exists

The Arrow format is a powerful standard for columnar data.
Apache Arrow has driven an entire ecosystem forward, with zero-copy interchange, multi-language support, and extensive integration.
Minarrow complements that ecosystem by focusing on Rust-first ergonomics, predictable SIMD behaviour, and extremely low build-time friction.

Key Features

Fast Compilation

Minarrow compiles in under 1.5 seconds with default features, minimising development iteration time with < 0.15s rebuilds. This is achieved through minimal dependencies - primarily num-traits with optional rayon for parallelism.

Data access

Minarrow provides direct, always-typed access to array values. Unlike other Rust implementations that unify all array types as untyped byte buffers (requiring downcasting and dynamic checks), Minarrow retains concrete types throughout the API. This enables developers to inspect and manipulate data without downcasting or additional indirection, ensuring safe and ergonomic access at all times.

Type System

Six concrete array types cover common workloads:

• BooleanArray
• CategoricalArray
• DatetimeArray
• FloatArray
• IntegerArray
• StringArray

Unified views:

• NumericArray
• TextArray
• TemporalArray

And a single top-level Array for mixed tables.

Example: Create Arrays

use std::sync::Arc;  
use minarrow::{Array, IntegerArray, NumericArray, arr_bool, arr_cat32, arr_f64, arr_i32, arr_i64, arr_str32, vec64};  

let int_arr = arr_i32![1, 2, 3, 4];  
let float_arr = arr_f64![0.5, 1.5, 2.5];  
let bool_arr = arr_bool![true, false, true];  
let str_arr = arr_str32!["a", "b", "c"];  
let cat_arr = arr_cat32!["x", "y", "x", "z"];  

assert_eq!(int_arr.len(), 4);  
assert_eq!(str_arr.len(), 3);  

let int = IntegerArray::<i64>::from_slice(&[100, 200]);  
let wrapped: NumericArray = NumericArray::Int64(Arc::new(int));  
let array = Array::NumericArray(wrapped);  

Example: Build Table

use minarrow::{FieldArray, Print, Table, arr_i32, arr_str32, vec64};  

let col1 = FieldArray::from_inner("numbers", arr_i32![1, 2, 3]);  
let col2 = FieldArray::from_inner("letters", arr_str32!["x", "y", "z"]);  

let mut tbl = Table::new("Demo".into(), vec![col1, col2].into());  
tbl.print();  

See _examples/_ for more.

When working with arrays, remember to import the MaskedArray trait, which ensures all required methods are available.

SIMD by Default

• All buffers use 64-byte-aligned allocation from ingestion through processing. No reallocation step to fix alignment.
• Stable vectorised behaviour on modern CPUs via Vec64 with a custom allocator.
• The companion Lightstream-IO crate provides IPC readers and writers that maintain this alignment, avoiding reallocation overhead during data ingestion.

Enum-Based Architecture

Minarrow uses enums for type dispatch instead of trait object downcasting, providing:

• Performance – Enables aggressive compiler inlining and optimisation
• Maintainability – Centralised, predictable dispatch logic
• Type Safety – All types are statically known; no Any or runtime downcasts
• Ergonomics – Direct, typed accessors such as myarray.num().i64()

The structure is layered:

1. Top-level Array enum – Arc-wrapped for zero-copy sharing
2. Semantic groupings:
   • NumericArray – All numeric types in one variant set
   • TextArray – String and categorical data
   • TemporalArray – All date/time variants
   • BooleanArray – Boolean data

This design supports flexible function signatures like impl Into<NumericArray> while preserving static typing.
Because dispatch is static, the compiler retains full knowledge of types across calls, enabling inlining and eliminating virtual call overhead.

Flexible Integration

• Apache Arrow compatibility via .to_apache_arrow().
• Polars compatibility via .to_polars().
• Async support through the companion Lightstream crate
• Zero-copy views for windowed operations (see Views and Windowing below)
• Memory-mapped file support with maintained SIMD alignment
• FFI Support for cross-language compatibility.

Lightstream (planned Aug ’25) enables IPC streaming in Tokio async contexts with composable encoder/decoder traits, both sync and async, without losing SIMD alignment.

Views and Windowing

• Optional view variants provide zero-copy windowed access to arrays, and encode offset and length for efficient subset operations without copying.
• For extreme performance needs, minimal tuple aliases (&InnerArrayVariant, offset, len) are available.

Benchmarks

Sum of 1 billion sequential integers starting at 0.

Intel(R) Core(TM) Ultra 7 155H | x86_64 | 22 CPUs
Averaged over 1,000 runs (release).

No SIMD

(n=1000, lanes=4, iters=1000)

SIMD

(n=1000, lanes=4, iters=1000)

SIMD + Rayon

(n=1000, lanes=4, iters=1000)

Ideal Use Cases

Design Philosophy

• Direct data access over abstraction layers
• Developer velocity through simple, predictable APIs
• Performance with SIMD as a first-class citizen
• Interoperability while maintaining its own identity

This approach trades some features (like deeply nested types) for a more streamlined experience in common data processing scenarios.

Contributing

We welcome contributions! Areas of focus include:

1. Connectors - Connectors to data sources and sinks
2. Optimisations - Performance improvements that maintain API simplicity
3. Bug Fixes - Bug fixes and improvements
4. PyO3 Integration - Python bindings and interoperability
5. List and Struct Types - Support for nested types (PRs welcome)
6. Datetime - Improving datetime ergonomics.

Additionally, if you are interested in working on a SIMD kernels crate that's in development, and have relevant experience, please feel free to reach out.

Please see CONTRIBUTING.md for contributing guidelines.

License

This project is licensed under the MIT License. See LICENSE for details.

Acknowledgments

Special thanks to the Apache Arrow community and all contributors to the Arrow ecosystem. Minarrow is inspired by the excellent work and standards established by these projects.

Feedback

We value community input and would appreciate your thoughts and feedback. Please don't hesitate to reach out with questions, suggestions, or contributions.