{"slug": "show-hn-icebug-format-immutable-interoperable-graph-standard", "title": "Show HN: Icebug-format: immutable, interoperable graph standard", "summary": "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.", "body_md": "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 loading a billion edge graph using G.add_edge() it's going to take a while.\n\nWe 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.\n\nicebug-format combines both into a on-disk standard based on Apache Parquet and an in-memory format based on Apache Arrow.\n\nBindings available in many popular languages including python, typescript and rust.\n\nThe package ships with convenience scripts to convert flat tables such as vertex.parquet and edges.parquet to this format in RAM/disk constrained environments.\n\nSample graphs:\n[https://huggingface.co/datasets/ladybugdb/ldbc-csr/tree/main](https://huggingface.co/datasets/ladybugdb/ldbc-csr/tree/main)\n\nConverted from:\n[https://ldbcouncil.org/benchmarks/graphalytics/datasets/](https://ldbcouncil.org/benchmarks/graphalytics/datasets/)\n\nLargest converted graph has 3B edges. License: MIT\n\nQuick Start:\n\n```\n  uv tool install icebug-format\n  icebug-format --source-dir wiki-Talk\n  lbug -i wiki-Talk-csr/schema.cypher\n```\n\nComments URL: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49381909](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49381909)\n\nPoints: 1\n\n# Comments: 0", "url": "https://wpnews.pro/news/show-hn-icebug-format-immutable-interoperable-graph-standard", "canonical_source": "https://github.com/Ladybug-Memory/icebug-format", "published_at": "2026-08-20 23:57:45+00:00", "updated_at": "2026-08-21 00:14:01.955431+00:00", "lang": "en", "topics": ["developer-tools", "ai-infrastructure"], "entities": ["Apache Arrow", "Apache Parquet", "Icebug-format", "LDBC Graphalytics", "Python", "TypeScript", "Rust"], "alternates": {"html": "https://wpnews.pro/news/show-hn-icebug-format-immutable-interoperable-graph-standard", "markdown": "https://wpnews.pro/news/show-hn-icebug-format-immutable-interoperable-graph-standard.md", "text": "https://wpnews.pro/news/show-hn-icebug-format-immutable-interoperable-graph-standard.txt", "jsonld": "https://wpnews.pro/news/show-hn-icebug-format-immutable-interoperable-graph-standard.jsonld"}}