Idea: Allow plotly.js to accept numpy buffers

If we allowed all GL plot types to accept numpy buffers for plot x/y/z data, then the Python library could optionally avoid JSON serialization of array data, like @maartenbreddels does in his brillant project ipyvolume:

https://github.com/maartenbreddels/ipyvolume/blob/master/ipyvolume/serialize.py#L95

Here is the deserialization on the JS side:

https://github.com/maartenbreddels/ipyvolume/blob/master/js/src/serialize.js#L16

Plotly.js has all of these incredible WebGL figures for scientific computing, but their potential in Python, R, MATLAB, etc is limited by the JSON serialization step.

In a similar vein, it seems like all GL types should be able to accept Float32Array’s directly instead of untyped JS arrays. Currently, it looks like only the Plotly trace type pointcloud accepts Float32Array’s:

https://codepen.io/plotly/pen/GEoPgv

[antoinerg]

Somewhat related to this thread and the topic of data serialization: I came across Apache Arrow which is a cross-language in-memory representation for columnar data to go from the current inefficient copy & convert: to a much-more efficient:

[jackparmer]

This issue has been tagged with NEEDS SPON$OR

A community PR for this feature would certainly be welcome, but our experience is deeper features like this are difficult to complete without the Plotly maintainers leading the effort.

Sponsorship range: $10k-$15k

What Sponsorship includes:

• Completion of this feature to the Sponsor’s satisfaction, in a manner coherent with the rest of the Plotly.js library and API
• Tests for this feature
• Long-term support (continued support of this feature in the latest version of Plotly.js)
• Documentation at plotly.com/javascript
• Possibility of integrating this feature with Plotly Graphing Libraries (Python, R, F#, Julia, MATLAB, etc)
• Possibility of integrating this feature with Dash
• Feature announcement on community.plotly.com with shout out to Sponsor (or can remain anonymous)
• Gratification of advancing the world’s most downloaded, interactive scientific graphing libraries (>50M downloads across supported languages)

Please include the link to this issue when contacting us to discuss.