This is a companion discussion topic for the original entry at https://www.rstudio.com/blog/arrow-and-beyond
Two years ago, Wes McKinney and Hadley Wickham got together to discuss some of the systems challenges facing the Python and R communities. Data science teams inevitably work with multiple languages and systems, so it’s critical that data flow seamlessly and efficiently between these environments. Wes and Hadley wanted to explore opportunities to collaborate on tools for improving interoperability between Python, R, and external compute and storage systems. This discussion led to the creation of the feather file format, a very fast on-disk format for storing data frames that can be read and written to by multiple languages.