At its core, Arrow was designed for high-performance analytics and supports efficient analytic operations on modern hardware like CPUs and GPUs with lightning-fast data access.
It offers a standardized, language-agnostic specification for representing structured, table-like datasets in-memory.
Here’s a great overview.
To support cross-language development, Arrow currently works with popular languages such as C, Go, Java, JavaScript, Python, R, Ruby, among others. The project also includes a query engine that works with Arrow data called DataFusion that is written in Rust.