Arrow, Rust, and cross-language data science tooling

Josiah Parry (Environmental Systems Research Institute, Inc. (Esri))
Robin Lovelace (University of Leeds Institute for Transport Studies (ITS))
Wednesday session 3 (Zoom) (16:0017:00 BST)
Watch a recording of this talk on YouTube

The rapid growth of Apache Arrow and Rust has fostered an ecosystem ideal for building high-performance, cross-language scientific computing tools. Rust's robust FFI support enables seamless integration across languages like R (extendr), Julia (jlrs), and Python (PyO3), while Apache Arrow's standardized memory layout eliminates costly (de)serialization overhead. This talk demonstrates how a single Rust library can power diverse scientific communities, using the anime crate for network science as a case study.