Design philosophy

annnet is designed with these principles:

• Simple, consistent interface for all graph types.
• Interoperability‑first: integrate, don’t replace.
• Performance‑aware, not performance‑obsessed.
• Extensible and modular, not monolithic.

Architectural choices

• Separate structure from attributes: sparse incidence matrix for topology; attributes in Polars tables.
• Lazy interoperability: convert to NetworkX/igraph/graph‑tool only when needed (via proxies G.nx, G.ig, G.gt).
• Slices and views: copy‑on‑write patterns for subgraphs and state changes.
• Lossless storage: .annnet directories combine Zarr (arrays) and Parquet (tables), plus JSON sidecars.

See the architecture overview for a deeper dive into data layout, conversion manifests, hyperedge semantics, and multilayer networks.