Make pyarrow a required dependency · Issue #52509 · pandas-dev/pandas (original) (raw)

Right now we run into a bunch of problems because pyarrow is potentially missing.

• It is pretty awkward to check for arrow inputs, e.g if we get an arrow array as input we have no good way of figuring this out (see https://github.com/pandas-dev/pandas/pull/52076/files)
• We can’t properly identify arrow scalars in all kinds of ops (e.g. indexing ops BUG: Setting a pyarrow scalar value with the same type that expands the series changes the dtype into object #52235, BUG: Pyarrow scalars inferred as object dtype with arrow backend enabled whwn assigning a new column #52056)
• Proper constructor support is not possible right now without causing significant slowdowns

This is the next step in supporting arrow fully in pandas. There are some things we can’t implement properly without requiring arrow as dependency.
So I think we should do it soonish, so that we can move forward.

cc @pandas-dev/pandas-core