MojoFrame: dataframe library in Mojo language

Mojo is an emerging programming language built on MLIR (Multi-Level Intermediate Representation) and JIT compilation. It enables transparent optimizations with respect to the underlying hardware (e.g., CPUs, GPUs), while allowing users to express their logic using Python-like user-friendly syntax. Mojo has been shown to offer great performance in tensor operations; however, its performance has not been tested for relational operations (e.g., filtering, join, and group-by), which are common in data science workflows. To date, no dataframe implementation exists in the Mojo ecosystem. In this work, we introduce the first Mojo-native dataframe library, called MojoFrame, that supports core relational operations and user-defined functions (UDFs). MojoFrame is built on top of Mojo’s tensor to achieve fast operations on numeric columns, while utilizing a cardinality-aware approach to effectively integrate non-numeric columns for flexible data representation. To achieve high efficiency, MojoFrame takes significantly different approaches than existing libraries. MojoFrame supports all operations for TPC-H queries, and achieves up to 2.97× speedup versus existing dataframe libraries in other programming languages. Nevertheless, there remain optimization opportunities for MojoFrame (and the Mojo language), particularly in data loading and dictionary operations.

Name thesis:degree_name

M.S.

Level thesis:degree_level

Thesis

Discipline thesis:degree_discipline

Computer Science

Grantor

University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign

Year dc:date

2025

Author dc:creator

• Huang, Arthur

Contributors dc:contributor

• Park, Yongjoo

• Mlir
• Jit Compilation
• Systems For Data Science
• Systems For Machine Learning
• Dataframe
• Database Management Systems

Statement dc:rights

• Copyright 2025 Arthur Huang

Language dc:language

en, eng

Handle dc:identifier

https://hdl.handle.net/2142/129945

OAI record oai:identifier

https://www.ideals.illinois.edu/oai-pmh?verb=GetRecord&metadataPrefix=etdms&identifier=oai%3Awww.ideals.illinois.edu%3A2142%2F129945