cd /news/developer-tools/show-hn-icebug-format-immutable-inte… · home topics developer-tools article
[ARTICLE · art-105276] src=github.com ↗ pub= topic=developer-tools verified=true sentiment=· neutral

Show HN: Icebug-format: immutable, interoperable graph standard

Icebug-format, a new open-source graph standard combining Apache Arrow and Compressed Sparse Rows (CSR) into an immutable, interoperable format, has been released under the MIT license. The format, which supports on-disk storage via Apache Parquet and in-memory via Arrow, includes bindings for Python, TypeScript, and Rust, and has converted the largest graph with 3 billion edges from the LDBC Graphalytics benchmark.

read1 min views3 publishedAug 20, 2026

Most graph analytics packages have a mutable graph implementation that uses a heap allocated vector to store the graph. It works for toy graphs. But if you're a billion edge graph using G.add_edge() it's going to take a while.

We don't need to invent new standards. Such interoperable, immutable memory standards already exist: Apache Arrow and Compressed Sparse Rows (CSR). CSR is widely used in scipy, cugraph and columnar graph databases among others. Both on CPUs and GPUs.

icebug-format combines both into a on-disk standard based on Apache Parquet and an in-memory format based on Apache Arrow.

Bindings available in many popular languages including python, typescript and rust.

The package ships with convenience scripts to convert flat tables such as vertex.parquet and edges.parquet to this format in RAM/disk constrained environments.

Sample graphs: https://huggingface.co/datasets/ladybugdb/ldbc-csr/tree/main

Converted from: https://ldbcouncil.org/benchmarks/graphalytics/datasets/

Largest converted graph has 3B edges. License: MIT

Quick Start:

  uv tool install icebug-format
  icebug-format --source-dir wiki-Talk
  lbug -i wiki-Talk-csr/schema.cypher

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49381909

Points: 1

── more in #developer-tools 4 stories · sorted by recency
── more on @apache arrow 3 stories trending now
sponsored brought to you by zahid.host 4,200+ EU-deployed projects
reading about agents? ship yours in a single git push.

Run your AI side-project on zahid.host

EU-based hosting, git-push deploys, automatic HTTPS, no cold starts. Free tier with a custom domain — perfect for shipping the agent you just read about.

$git push zahid main
Live at https://your-agent.zahid.host
Get free account → Pricing
from €0/mo · no card required
LIVE [news/show-hn-icebug-forma…] indexed:0 read:1min 2026-08-20 ·