I think boolean is useful to have. What I'm more skeptical of is adding standard types for variations like UnsignedInteger16, etc. that don't have natural representations in all languages.
On Fri, Sep 27, 2019 at 2:46 PM Brian Hulette <bhule...@google.com> wrote: > > Some more context from an offline discussion I had with +Robert Bradshaw a > while ago: We both agreed all of the coders listed in BEAM-7996 should be > implemented in Python, but didn't come to a conclusion on whether or not they > should actually be _standard_ coders, versus just being implicitly standard > as part of row coder. > > On Fri, Sep 27, 2019 at 2:29 PM Kenneth Knowles <k...@apache.org> wrote: >> >> Yes, noted here: >> https://github.com/apache/beam/pull/9188/files#diff-f0d64c2cfc4583bfe2a7e5ee59818ae2R678 >> and that links to https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/BEAM-7996 >> >> Kenn >> >> On Fri, Sep 27, 2019 at 12:57 PM Reuven Lax <re...@google.com> wrote: >>> >>> Java has one, implemented as a byte coder. My guess is that nobody has >>> gotten around to implementing it yet for portability. >>> >>> On Fri, Sep 27, 2019 at 12:44 PM Chad Dombrova <chad...@gmail.com> wrote: >>>> >>>> Hi all, >>>> It seems a bit unfortunate that there isn’t a portable way to serialize a >>>> boolean value. >>>> >>>> I’m working on porting my external PubsubIO PR over to use the improved >>>> schema-based external transform API in python, but because of this >>>> limitation I can’t use boolean values. For example, this fails: >>>> >>>> ReadFromPubsubSchema = typing.NamedTuple( >>>> 'ReadFromPubsubSchema', >>>> [ >>>> ('topic', typing.Optional[unicode]), >>>> ('subscription', typing.Optional[unicode]), >>>> ('id_label', typing.Optional[unicode]), >>>> ('with_attributes', bool), >>>> ('timestamp_attribute', typing.Optional[unicode]), >>>> ] >>>> ) >>>> >>>> It fails because coders.get_coder(bool) returns the non-portable pickle >>>> coder. >>>> >>>> In the short term I can hack something into the external transform API to >>>> use varint coder for bools, but this kind of hacky approach to portability >>>> won’t work in scenarios where round-tripping is required without user >>>> intervention. In other words, in python it is not uncommon to test if x is >>>> True, in which case the integer 1 would fail this test. All of that is to >>>> say that a BooleanCoder would be a convenient way to ensure the proper >>>> type is used everywhere. >>>> >>>> So, I was just wondering why it’s not there? Are there concerns over >>>> whether booleans are universal enough to make part of the portability >>>> standard? >>>> >>>> -chad
