Other use cases

In addition to providing an interface for zero-copy sharing of Arrow data between components, the C Data API can also be used in cases where it may not be feasible to depend on the Arrow libraries directly.

Despite a large number of languages and runtimes sporting implementations of Arrow, there are still languages or environments that do not have Arrow implementations. This is particularly true in organizations with a lot of legacy software and/or specialized environments. A great example of this would be the fact that the dominant programming language in the astrophysical modeling of stars and galaxies is still Fortran! Unsurprisingly, there is not an existing Arrow implementation for Fortran. In these situations, it is often not feasible to rewrite entire code bases so that you can leverage Arrow in a supported language. But with the C Data API, data can be shared from a supported runtime to a pre-existing unsupported code base. Alternatively, you can do the...