Hardwood 1.0: A Fast, Lightweight Apache Parquet Reader for the JVM

Table of Contents Why Hardwood What’s in Hardwood 1.0 Performance The Hardwood CLI Building Open-Source With AI A Big Thank You What’s Ahead Hardwood is a new Parquet library for the JVM, written from scratch to do one thing well: read (and soon, write) Apache Parquet files fast, with no mandatory dependencies. It is performance-focused and multi-threaded at its core, fanning page decoding out across all your CPU cores by default. Today, Hardwood reaches 1.0. After five preview releases since the start of the year (Alpha1, Beta1, Beta2, CR1, CR2), we now consider Hardwood ready for production, and its public API will evolve with a strong focus on backwards compatibility going forward. Hardwood targets Java 21 or newer, is open-source (Apache License 2.0), and is available from Maven Central.