[kylebarron]

Arrow JS is just ArrayBuffers underneath. You do want to amortize some operations to avoid unnecessary conversions. I.e. Arrow JS stores strings as UTF-8, but native JS strings are UTF-16 I believe.

Arrow is especially powerful across the WASM <--> JS boundary! In fact, I wrote a library to interpret Arrow from Wasm memory into JS without any copies [0]. (Motivating blog post [1])

[0]: https://github.com/kylebarron/arrow-js-ffi

[1]: https://observablehq.com/@kylebarron/zero-copy-apache-arrow-...

[lmeyerov]

Yeah, we built it to essentially stream columnar record batches from server GPUs to browser GPUs with minimal touching of any of the array buffers. It was very happy-path for that kind of fast bulk columnar processing, and we donated it to the community to grow to use cases beyond that. So it sounds like the client code may have been doing more than that.

For high performance code, I'd have expected overhead in %s, not Xs. And not surprised to hear slowdowns for any straying beyond that -- cool to see folks have expanded further! More recently, we've been having good experiences more recently here in Perspective <-arrow-> Loaders, enough so that we haven't had to dig deeper. Our current code is targeting < 24 FPS, as genAI data analytics is more about bigger volumes than velocity, so unsure. However, it's hard to imagine going much faster though given it's bulk typed arrays without copying, especially on real code.