Almost all modern CPU have a vector processing unit, making it possible to write faster code for a large category of problems, at the cost of portability - there a re many different instruction sets in the wild! The xsimd library makes it possible to write portable C++ code that targets different architectures and sub-architectures. The specialization choice can be made at compile-time or at runtime, using a provided dispatching mechanism. Intel, ARM, RiscV and Webassembly are supported, and the library has already been adopted by Xtensor, Pythran, Apache Arrow and Firefox.

Apache Arrow has become a de-facto standard for efficient in-memory columnar data representation. Beyond the standardized and language-independent columnar memory format for tabular data, the Apache Arrow project also has a growing set of supplementary specifications and language implementations. This talk will give an overview of the recent developments in the Apache Arrow ecosystem, including ADBC, nanoarrow, new data types, and the Arrow PyCapsule protocol.