Hello, We are trying to migrate from Arrow 0.16.0 to a newer version, hopefully up to 4.0.0. The Arrow 0.17.0 change in AllocateBuffer from taking a shared_ptr<Buffer> to returning a unique_ptr<Buffer> is making things very difficult. We wonder if there is a strong reason behind the change from shared_ptr to unique_ptr and if there is an easier path forward for us.
In our code, we interchangeably use Buffer and ResizableBuffer. We pass around these pointers across a number of classes. They are allocated or resized here https://github.com/Paradigm4/bridge/blob/master/src/Driver.h#L191 Moreover, we cast the ResizableBuffer instance to Buffer in order to have all our methods only deal with Buffer, here https://github.com/Paradigm4/bridge/blob/master/src/Driver.h#L151 In Arrow 0.16.0 AllocateBuffer took a shared_ptr<Buffer> and this works fine. In Arrow 0.17.0 AllocateBuffer returns a unique_ptr<Buffer>. Our cast from ResizableBuffer to Buffer won't work on unique_ptr and we won't be able to pass the Buffer around so easily. I noticed that there is another AllocateBuffer in MemoryManger that returns a shared_ptr. https://arrow.apache.org/docs/cpp/api/memory.html?highlight=resizablebuffer#_CPPv4N5arrow13MemoryManager14AllocateBufferE7int64_t Is this a better alternative to allocate a buffer? Is there a similar method to allocate a resizable buffer? Thank you, Rares
