Minarrow - Apache Arrow tuned for HPC, Native Streaming, and Embedded

Intro

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 talk interchange — but the core stays lean.

Minarrow is the base layer of several related projects that expand on it to deliver a full set of SIMD-accelerated Kernels, Tokio streamable buffers, and a full-scale engine.

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 I built Minarrow

• 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.
• It's easy, fast, and simple — built to deliver extreme performance without sacrificing ergonomics.

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.

The inner arrays match the Arrow IPC memory layout.

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

Intel(R) Core(TM) Ultra 7 155H | x86_64 | 22 CPUs

Sum of 1,000 sequential integers starting at 0. Averaged over 1,000 runs (release).

No SIMD

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

Case	Avg time
Integer (i64)
raw vec: Vec<i64>	85 ns
minarrow direct: IntegerArray	88 ns
arrow-rs struct: Int64Array	147 ns
minarrow enum: IntegerArray	124 ns
arrow-rs dyn: Int64Array	181 ns
Float (f64)
raw vec: Vec<f64>	475 ns
minarrow direct: FloatArray	476 ns
arrow-rs struct: Float64Array	527 ns
minarrow enum: FloatArray	507 ns
arrow-rs dyn: Float64Array	1.952 µs

SIMD

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

Case	Avg (ns)
raw vec: Vec<i64>	64
raw vec64: Vec64<i64>	55
minarrow direct: IntegerArray	88
arrow-rs struct: Int64Array	162
minarrow enum: IntegerArray	170
arrow-rs dyn: Int64Array	173
raw vec: Vec<f64>	57
raw vec64: Vec64<f64>	58
minarrow direct: FloatArray	91
arrow-rs struct: Float64Array	181
minarrow enum: FloatArray	180
arrow-rs dyn: Float64Array	196

SIMD + Rayon

Sum of 1 billion sequential integers starting at 0.

(n=1,000,000,000, lanes=4)

Case	Time (ms)
SIMD + Rayon IntegerArray<i64>	113.874
SIMD + Rayon FloatArray<f64>	114.095

Other factors (SIMD + No SIMD Benchmarks)

Vec construction (generating + allocating 1000 elements - avg): 87 ns
Vec64 construction (avg): 84 ns

The construction delta is not included in the benchmark timings above.

Ideal Use Cases

Use Case	Description
Real-time Data Pipelines	Zero-copy interchange for streaming and event-driven systems
Embedded and Edge Computing	Minimal deps, predictable memory layout, fast compile
Systems-Level Integration	64-byte alignment and FFI-friendly representation
High-Performance Analytics	SIMD kernels and direct buffer access
Rapid Prototyping and Development	Simple type system, intuitive APIs
Data-Intensive Rust Applications	Rust-native data structures with no runtime abstraction penalty
Extreme Latency Scenarios	Inner types for trading, defence, and other nanosecond-sensitive systems

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. Special call out also to Arrow2 and Polars. Minarrow is inspired by the consistently great work and standards driven 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.