Add method to Array interface to retrieve native Go values #462
Description
Describe the enhancement requested
In downstream projects using the Apache Arrow Go library — particularly in driver implementations and generic data ingestion layers — there’s often a need to extract values from an arrow.Array without knowing its concrete type ahead of time.
Currently, this requires verbose type switches and manual downcasting for each array type, which adds boilerplate and makes generic handling of data more complex.
To simplify this pattern, we propose adding a method to the Array interface that returns the Go-native equivalent of the value at a given index. For example:
ValueAsAny(index int) any
This change would significantly reduce boilerplate and improve ergonomics in downstream projects that need to interface with Arrow arrays in a type-agnostic way.
Component(s)
Other