Some exercises
Before moving on, see whether you can come up with any other use cases that use the C data API to communicate between languages or runtimes in a single process, and sketch out simple implementations or rough outlines to set it up. You can either use the Arrow libraries to import/export data or build some adapter from one data format into the C structure to return data in the Arrow format easily.
Consider this – you have a database engine and you want to add an option to deliver results as Arrow-formatted data, but you don’t want to impose a new dependency on the project by relying directly on the Arrow libraries. How can you provide this without linking against the Arrow libraries and including the Arrow C++ headers? What would the API look like?
Maybe try reversing the direction of some of our import/export examples to pass data to Python, C++, or some other combination of technologies, languages, or runtimes. Be creative!
Of course, I’...