Epic: Harden Type System #10730

This Epic is for hardening Vortex's type system, ensuring it is sound, consistent, and robust.

Status

Active.

Goal

We want to ensure that users of Vortex do not run into any issues with Vortex's type system. In an ideal world, all of these are true:

• Using provided types do not cause any issues (types are sound and consistent)
• Logical / physical boundary is always consistent
• Provided types are sufficient for most use cases (no missing provided types)
• Users (and us as well) can easily add their types via extension types
• Working with extension types is easy

Motivation

A robust type system means less bugs and easier abstractions. By ensuring this, users can interact with Vortex more confidently.

Two current examples: a Decimal dtype can have up to six canonical forms, which caused the fuzzer crashes in #5820 (#10701), and extension arrays leak their storage type through casts and comparisons (#7683).

Unresolved questions

• Do the planned 128-bit and 256-bit integer types and FixedSizeBinary (First class FixedSizeBinary support #9902) belong to this Epic? (yes)