This is the story of how I spent a year making the world's fastest Parquet loader in JavaScript. The goal:

- Make a faster, more interactive viewer for AI datasets (which are mostly parquet format)

- Simplify the stack by doing everything from the browser (no backend)

TLDR: My open-source library Hyparquet can load data in 155ms, which would take 3466ms in duckdb-wasm for the same file.