Very cool! I'm not personally aware of anything built-in to do this (@NickCrews do you know? :)). From an approach perspective, my first thought was also has_operation/doing things in the way of the operation support matrix, but your reasoning and alternative approach makes sense.

My thoughts are:

• It's not ideal that you have to hit the matrix and parse it each time you instantiate the checker. It also makes it dependent on the matrix format (which, to be fair, doesn't really change).
• The bigger drawback in my opinion is that you see the latest support matrix (off main) as opposed to that for any version.

I wonder if it would make sense to just run a process that computes the matrix for a tagged release (probably check out the code, install all the dependencies, run the same code but output to a file), store thise matrices on GitHub or wherever, and that way any users just download that file instead of scraping latest?

Thanks for taking a peek @deepyaman!

I incorporated your suggestions.

Once I get the docs building locally I'll remove the piece that parses from the docs site😁(re: #11799)

Thanks, this is cool. I think your solution is probably the best possible at this time, there is no secret backdoor in the internals that I know of. In fact, I've never even looked at the matrix generator code.

I also am curious what you think about the simple true/false for support, for example some backends only support some args to certain operations, eg (this isn't exactly right but you get the idea) you can only exclude nulls in ArrayCollect on sqlite, if you do .collect(include_nulls=True) you get a runtime error. So that in my mind is partial support for the general ArrayCollect op, only with a concrete instance of ArrayCollect would you be able to tell.

Ideas on how ibis could improve here:

• don't require eg psycopg to be installed to compile expressions to postgres, and check for compatibility. You only need psycopg to execute.
  -improve how backends declare their support for operations so they can be analyzed statically/declaratively (I actually have no idea how this is currently done but I bet it takes some actual execution)
• when we compute the support matrix, we could save that as a machine readable file eg Json for easier and more stable consumption.
• we could actually publish this in a release for this sort of checking in a base ibis install with no backends required