Extremely lightweight and extensible compatibility layer between dataframe libraries!
- Full API support: cuDF, Modin, pandas, Polars, PyArrow
- Interchange-level support: Ibis, Vaex, anything else which implements the DataFrame Interchange Protocol
Seamlessly support all, without depending on any!
- ✅ Just use a subset of the Polars API, no need to learn anything new
- ✅ Zero dependencies, Narwhals only uses what the user passes in so your library can stay lightweight
- ✅ Separate lazy and eager APIs, use expressions
- ✅ Support pandas' complicated type system and index, without either getting in the way
- ✅ 100% branch coverage, tested against pandas and Polars nightly builds
- ✅ Negligible overhead, see overhead
- ✅ Let your IDE help you thanks to full static typing, see typing
- ✅ Perfect backwards compatibility policy, see stable api for how to opt-in
Get started!
Join the party!
Feel free to add your project to the list if it's missing, and/or chat with us on Discord if you'd like any support.
- pip (recommended, as it's the most up-to-date)
pip install narwhals - conda-forge (also fine, but the latest version may take longer to appear)
conda install -c conda-forge narwhals
There are three steps to writing dataframe-agnostic code using Narwhals:
-
use
narwhals.from_nativeto wrap a pandas/Polars/Modin/cuDF/PyArrow DataFrame/LazyFrame in a Narwhals class -
use
narwhals.to_nativeto return an object to the user in its original dataframe flavour. For example:- if you started with pandas, you'll get pandas back
- if you started with Polars, you'll get Polars back
- if you started with Modin, you'll get Modin back (and compute will be distributed)
- if you started with cuDF, you'll get cuDF back (and compute will happen on GPU)
- if you started with PyArrow, you'll get PyArrow back
See the tutorial for several examples!
- Do you maintain a dataframe-consuming library?
- Do you have a specific Polars function in mind that you would like Narwhals to have in order to make your work easier?
If you said yes to both, we'd love to hear from you!
Note: You might suspect that this is a secret ploy to infiltrate the Polars API everywhere. Indeed, you may suspect that.
Narwhals is 100% independent, community-driven, and community-owned. We are extremely grateful to the following organisations for having provided some funding / development time:
If you contribute to Narwhals on your organization's time, please let us know. We'd be happy to add your employer to this list!
Thanks to Olha Urdeichuk for the illustration!