juntan

Would also highly recommend the HousingWorks Bookshop in Soho - they have a really incredible selection of both fiction and nonfiction, as well as art books. I am a fan of Book Thug Nation in Williamsburg, Molasses Books in Bushwick, and Mercer St. Books right near Washington Square Park.

The JS library hasn't been removed - it's the main UI and API over the WASM library that allows for Perspective to be used in the browser: https://perspective.finos.org/

In Perspective (https://github.com/finos/perspective), we use Apache Arrow as a fast, cross-language/cross-network data encoding that is extremely useful for in-browser data visualization and analytics. Some benefits:

- super fast read/write compared to CSV & JSON (Perspective and Arrow share an extremely similar column encoding scheme, so we can memcpy Arrow columns into Perspective wholesale instead of reading a dataset iteratively).

- the ability to send Arrow binaries as an ArrayBuffer between a Python server and a WASM client, which guarantees compatibility and removes the overhead of JSON serialization/deserialization.

- because Arrow columns are strictly typed, there's no need to infer data types - this helps with speed and correctness.

- Compared to JSON/CSV, Arrow binaries have a super compact encoding that reduces network transport time.

For us, building on top of Apache Arrow (and using it wherever we can) reduces the friction of passing around data between clients, servers, and runtimes in different languages, and allows larger datasets to be efficiently visualized and analyzed in the browser context.