The nanoarrow libraries are a set of helpers to produce and consume Arrow data, including the Arrow C Data, Arrow C Stream, and Arrow C Device, structures and the serialized Arrow IPC format. The vision of nanoarrow is that it should be trivial for libraries to produce and consume Arrow data: it helps fulfill this vision by providing high-quality, easy-to-adopt helpers to produce, consume, and test Arrow data types and arrays.
The nanoarrow libraries were built to be:
- Small: nanoarrow’s C runtime compiles into a few hundred kilobytes and its R and Python bindings both have an installed size of ~1 MB.
- Easy to depend on: nanoarrow's C library is distributed as two files (nanoarrow.c and nanoarrow.h) and its R and Python bindings have zero dependencies.
- Useful: The Arrow Columnar Format includes a wide range of data type and data encoding options. To the greatest extent practicable, nanoarrow strives to support the entire Arrow columnar specification (see the Arrow implementation status page for implementation status).
The nanoarrow Python bindings are available from PyPI and conda-forge:
pip install nanoarrow
conda install nanoarrow -c conda-forgeThe nanoarrow R package is available from CRAN:
install.packages("nanoarrow")See the nanoarrow Documentation for extended tutorials and API reference for the C, C++, Python, and R libraries.
The nanoarrow GitHub repository additionally provides a number of examples covering how to use nanoarrow in a variety of build configurations.
CMake is the primary build system used to develop and test the nanoarrow C library. You can build nanoarrow with:
mkdir build && cd build
cmake ..
cmake --build .Building nanoarrow with tests currently requires Arrow C++.
If installed via a system package manager like apt, dnf, or brew, the tests can be
built with:
mkdir build && cd build
cmake .. -DNANOARROW_BUILD_TESTS=ON
cmake --build .Tests can be run with ctest.
CMake is the officially supported build system for nanoarrow. However, the Meson backend is an experimental feature you may also wish to try.
meson setup builddir
cd builddirAfter setting up your project, be sure to enable the options you want:
meson configure -Dtests=true -Dbenchmarks=trueIf Arrow is installed in a non-standard location on your system, you may need to
pass the --pkg-config-path <path to directory with arrow.pc> argument to either
the setup or configure steps above.
With the above out of the way, the compile command should take care of the rest:
meson compileUpon a successful build you can execute the test suite and benchmarks with the following commands:
meson test nanoarrow: # default test run
meson test nanoarrow: --wrap valgrind # run tests under valgrind
meson test nanoarrow: --benchmark --verbose # run benchmarks
