Windows Access Violation with fill_null_forward() on ChunkedArray

[aiudirog]

Describe the bug, including details regarding any error messages, version, and platform.

I've encountered a consistent segfault when trying to use Pandas .ffill() with a boolean ChunkedArray on Windows (no problems on Linux):

import pandas as pd
import pyarrow as pa
print("Pandas:", pd.__version__)
print("PyArrow:", pa.__version__)

for i in range(1, 32):
    mx = 2 ** i
    print(i, mx)
    x = pd.Series(pd.NA, index=range(mx), dtype='boolean[pyarrow]')
    x[mx // 2] = True
    x.ffill()

This always crashes on the 12th iteration, when the array has 4096 values, across multiple computers with the following error:

Process finished with exit code -1073741819 (0xC0000005)

I dug under the hood to see what Pandas was doing and was able to create this pure PyArrow example (though I'm not sure if I'm using the API correctly):

import pyarrow as pa 
import pyarrow.compute as pc

pad = [None] * 4000
a = pa.chunked_array([pad, [True], pad], type=pa.bool_())
pc.fill_null_forward(a)

Additionally, I also tried to reproduce this with just pa.array() but that worked fine.

---

Operating System: Windows 10 (10.0.19045 Build 19045)
Processor: Intel Core i7-12850HX
Python Version: 3.12.7 (additionally confirmed by co-workers on 3.11 & 3.10)
PyArrow Versions Tested: 16.1, 17.0, 18.0, 18.1

Component(s)

Python