GDAL RFC 86 Column-oriented read API for vector layers

[rsbivand]

https://lists.osgeo.org/pipermail/gdal-dev/2022-June/055884.html introduces OSGeo/gdal#5830, https://github.com/rouault/gdal/blob/rfc_86/doc/source/development/rfc/rfc86_column_oriented_api.rst. Looks potentially promising! @edzer - is this helpful in sdsr?

[jorisvandenbossche]

Dewey is already working on a POC to consume it: https://github.com/paleolimbot/rfc86

[paleolimbot]

Joris beat me to it! I put that together yesterday because I was curious how much of the speed differences were internal to GDAL and how much of them were a result of (avoiding) constructing millions of R strings (my lightly tested conclusion was that it's some of both).

I think the main benefit will be that all the packages implementing a version of readOGR won't have to implement their own OGR field -> R vector logic. In that proof-of-concept I use the Arrow R package's conversion but there's no reason that the conversion couldn't live in something standalone (like narrow).