[wrcwill]

i was using rust numpy for this, i wonder how much faster this is and if it supports passing arrays of strings

[rdedev]

Yup. It supports arrays of strings.

https://docs.rs/arrow/6.2.0/arrow/array/type.LargeStringArra...

As for performance, YMMV but I think it could be faster since storing a list of strings as a numpy array would involve padding. Arrow arrays can get away without padding