Overview

Apache Arrow utilities for luma.gl.

API Reference

• Arrow Utilities
• Arrow Representations
• Arrow Table Preparation
• Supported Arrow Types
• deck.gl v10 API Directions

Apache Arrow Preliminaries

Apache Arrow has a rich type system that can represent a wide variety of binary data columns. A subset of these column types can be used directly as GPU vertex attribute data, meaning that such arrow columns can be uploaded efficiently to the GPU.

Apache Arrow supports primitive types like Float32, Uint32, and Uint8 that describe the value stored in each row. It also supports fixed-length vectors of these types with FixedSizeList. These scalar and fixed-length vector types map directly to the memory layouts used by GPU vertex attributes.

Arrow also supports variable-length List columns. These are useful for data such as polygons and paths, but they do not map directly to a single vertex attribute without an additional conversion step. ArrowPathModel provides the attribute-backed conversion for prepared Float32 XY, XYZ, and XYZM path coordinate rows, expanding each logical path into segment instances while keeping row-level style columns at the path boundary. ArrowStoragePathModel provides the WebGPU storage-backed form: compute expands GPU-resident path values into compact indexed segment records from copied list-offset metadata, render shaders fetch coordinates from the original path-value storage buffer, and per-path style rows remain storage bindings instead of being repeated for every generated segment. Use ArrowPathModel.prepareGPUVectors() or prepareArrowPathGPUVectors() to turn raw Float32 or Float64 Arrow path vectors into prepared attribute-path inputs. Use ArrowStoragePathModel.prepareGPUVectors() or prepareArrowStoragePathGPUVectors() when WebGPU storage rendering should convert Float64 path payloads into Float32 deltas on the GPU before rendering.

GPU Table Interop

@luma.gl/arrow is the adapter layer from Apache Arrow objects into the generic types in @luma.gl/tables:

• makeGPUDataFromArrowData() uploads one Arrow Data chunk into a GPUData.
• makeGPUVectorFromArrow() uploads one Arrow Vector into a GPUVector.
• makeGPURecordBatchFromArrowRecordBatch() uploads one Arrow RecordBatch.
• makeGPUTableFromArrowTable() uploads one Arrow Table while preserving source record batch boundaries.

The resulting table schema is GPUSchema, and each vector has a GPUVector.format memory-layout string such as float32x3, unorm8x4, or vertex-list<float32x3>. Arrow DataType metadata may still be retained by adapter/readback paths, but @luma.gl/tables itself does not depend on apache-arrow.

See luma.gl for documentation.