Support for polars dataframes

[muendlein]

As Polars is becoming more and more popular I am wondering if there are any consideration to support its dataframes. Given the performance oriented focus of this package, it might be solid contender.

[ianthomas23]

Yes, polars is certainly something we would like to add support for.

[ivirshup]

Other plotting libraries have been adding support for polars (and others) by supporting the __dataframe__ interchange protocol (https://data-apis.org/dataframe-protocol/latest/index.html)

• https://github.com/altair-viz/altair/pull/2888
• https://github.com/mwaskom/seaborn/pull/3369

I think this would be a great solution here as it would allow polars as well as other tabular libraries to be used with data shader.

My use case would be to provide a dataframe interface to plotting libraries from an AnnData object. This use case would rely on data shader only requesting the columns it actually needs for a plot, and not try to request every column of the dataframe..

[ianthomas23]

Yes, it is a good idea. It just needs someone to volunteer to do the required work.

[hathawayj]

I wonder if Narwhals could be leveraged?