[willtim]

You do raise a very important point. At my organisation, Apache Avro was selected by the Java Devs due to the "cross-platform" marketing. However, they found out after it was too late, that the C/C++ implementations were too buggy/incomplete to effectively interoperate with the Java versions.

[wesm]

Keep in mind that Arrow Java<->C++/Python interop has been in production use in Apache Spark and elsewhere for multiple years now. We have avoided some of the mistakes of past projects by really emphasizing protocol integration tests across the implementations.