H1 2026 planning

[joseph-isaacs]

Vortex Q1 2026 Roadmap - Draft Items (Not Final)

Topics and links to deeper planning docs.

---

Breaking Changes

• VTable Unification (h1)
  • ScalarFns
  • Layouts
  • Arrays (the big one)

Compute Overhaul (q1) @joseph-isaacs @connortsui20

• More lazy evaluation (break[array]: lazy compare function #6495, break[array]: mask compute to lazy mask execution #6485) (q1)
• Deprecate non-execute API (q1)
• Update the language bindings
• audit compute design
• CSE (common subexpression elimination)
• Kernel plugging
• Kernel selection
• Kernel-aware executor

Variable length array (h1) @a10y

• Builders with capacity @onursatici
• List <-> ListView: ListView Handling normalization #6470
• List layout
• Higher-order Functions

Scanning subsystem API (h1) @AdamGS

• Filter cardinality estimates
• Bindings (C/C++) @myrrc (duckdb, velox, siriusdb)
  • tier 1 -- arrow
  • tier 2 -- vortex array stream
  • tier 3 -- compressor layout
• Table API (@AdamGS @gatesn)
• Catalogue API

Extension Types and Arrays (h1) @connortsui20

• Ext VTable (q1) @connortsui20
• DateTimeParts (q1)
• Fixed size design XX (h1) @ALL
• Fixed-size Binary (canonical?)
• Fixed-size List
  • Vector
  • Matrix
  • Tensor (h1?) @connortsui20
• UUID
• JSON
• Tags

Additional First-Class Layouts

• List
• PDX / vector-specific
• Bloom filter
• Text index
• Variant data type support

Core APIs

• Reader v2 (lazy layout readers)
• AggregateFn
• Scalar v2 (support Array and Extension variants) @connortsui20
  • Extension Scalars (and types): Extension Data Types #6500

FastLanes Encodings

• RLE
• Delta
• Dict

GPU (q1) @0ax1 @a10y, (h1) @0ax1

• GSST
• Filter
• zstd
• Pipelined AoT kernel (q1)
• JIT pipeline kernel
• Patches (q1)

Lossy compression

• Lossy compressor for numerical types

I/O and Scheduling [blocked on Table API]

• Coalescing @AdamGS
• Extension point
• Resource-aware runs

DuckDB Integration

• Experiment with DuckDB runtime / async IO
• Automate keeping release branches up to date @0ax1

DataFusion Integration

• Support data-fusion casting

[connortsui20]

https://github.com/vortex-data/vortex/milestones