[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.