[domoritz]

One of the ArrowJS committers here. We have fixed a few significant performance bottlenecks over the last few versions so try again. Also, I'm also ways curious to see specific use cases that are slow so we can make ArrowJS even better. Some limitations are fundamental and you may be better off converting to the corresponding JS types (which should be fast).

[leeoniya]

it's been about 4 years, but in Grafana at the time we were using something like ArrowJS + Arrow Flight + protobuf.js to render datasets into dashboards on Canvas, especially for streaming at ~20hz.

when i benchmarked the fastest lib to simply run the protobuf decode (https://github.com/mapbox/pbf), it was 5x slower than native JSON parsing in browsers for dataframe-like structures (e.g. a few dozen 2k-long arrays of floats). this is before even hitting any ArrowJS iterators, etc).

Grafana's Go backend uses Arrow dataframes internally, so using the same on the frontend seemed like a logical initial choice back then, but the performance simply didn't pan out.