I totally agree — the C++ implementations of Parquet aren’t the best they could be. To be fair, though, it’s a tough problem: Parquet supports a broad range of encodings and compression schemes, and to do that, it pulls in a lot of dependencies and requires complex dependency management.

That’s one of the main reasons we built FastLanes from scratch instead of trying to integrate with Parquet.

With FastLanes, we’ve taken a different approach: zero dependencies, no SIMD intrinsics, and a design that’s fully auto-vectorizable. The result is simpler code that still delivers high performance.