Feather file format
Hacker ApprovedRanked 3 of 3 columnar file formats by recommenders
Fast columnar file format for dataframes, zero-copy and simpler than Arrow IPC for many uses. Caveat: inefficient for single-row appends and offers little compression.
Fast columnar file format for dataframes, zero-copy and simpler than Arrow IPC for many uses. Caveat: inefficient for single-row appends and offers little compression.
11 people gave an opinion
- recommend it
- 10
- criticize it
- 1
- approval share
- 91%
Recommended in 7 of 13 months
- November 2025: recommended
- December 2025: recommended
- January 2026: recommended
- February 2026: recommended
- March 2026: recommended
- April 2026: not recommended
- May 2026: recommended
- June 2026: not recommended
- July 2026: not recommended
- August 2026: recommended
- September 2026: not recommended
- October 2026: not recommended
- November 2026: not recommended (month in progress)
Why it carries the badge
- 10 people recommend itNeeds 10 or more, met.
- 10 recommenders for every criticNeeds 2 to 1 or better, met.
- Recommended in 7 of 13 monthsNeeds 4 or more, met.
The same three rules apply to every product, and the badge can’t be bought. How the badge works
What people say about it
The reasons people give, with the number of comments that give each one. Open a reason to read what they said.
Why people recommend it
Each mark is one comment
Fast access and good performance
“Parquet and Feather can have excellent performance and space efficiency if you use them for their intended purposes”
Comment from 2 Mar 2026 in “Why does C have the best file API” “Access is much faster from Feather but Feather is really good”
Comment from 20 Nov 2025 in “Vortex: An extensible, state of the art columnar file format”
What people warn about
Each mark is one comment
Inefficient at batch size of one
“Feather would work but is quite inefficient with a batch size of 1.”
Comment from 13 Aug 2026 in “Single log line is 49KB+ (ext4) / 110KB+ (btrfs) of systemd-journald disk writes” High per-append overhead
“The main problem is that the per-append overhead is kind of silly”
Comment from 13 Feb 2026 in “Apache Arrow is 10 years old” Little compression; Arrow makes it redundant
“Arrow makes Feather redundant. Very little in the way of compression (if any).”
Comment from 20 Nov 2025 in “Vortex: An extensible, state of the art columnar file format”
Other columnar file formats people recommend
The two most recommended other columnar file formats, with the same counts for each, so you can compare like for like. The tick on each bar marks the 2 to 1 line the badge needs.
| Product | Recommend | Criticize | Approval | Months | Owned | Badge |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Apache Arrow | 20 | 1 | 95% | 8 | — | Approved |
| Vortex file format | 13 | 3 | 81% | 8 | — | Approved |
| Feather file formatThis page | 10 | 1 | 91% | 7 | — | Approved |
What people said
12 of the 14 comments that mention it, newest first. Each links to the original comment.
“Feather would work but is quite inefficient with a batch size of 1.”
“Leading Monero wallets such as Featherwallet already run its own Tor connectivity”
“Parquet and Feather can have excellent performance and space efficiency if you use them for their intended purposes”
“Feather (Arrow IPC) is zero copy and an order of magnitude simpler.”
“Using Feather like it's a row store can do this.”
“The main problem is that the per-append overhead is kind of silly”
“was using it to power my unhinged topic modeling”
“agents/users get loops, conditionals, online help for free from Feather”
“icon packs encourage you to just pick the "closest" icon for a given menu item”
“haven't used it, but looks like a great idea!”
“Arrow makes Feather redundant. Very little in the way of compression (if any).”
“Access is much faster from Feather but Feather is really good”
Counts come from 1,795,640 Hacker News comments, November 2025 to November 2026. How we count. Report a mistake.