title: Arrow IPC vs Feather
body: <p>What is the difference between Arrow IPC and Feather?</p>
  <p>The <a href="https://arrow.apache.org/docs/python/feather.html" rel="nofollow noreferrer">official Arrow documentation</a> says:</p>
  <blockquote>
  <p>Version 2 (V2), the default version, which is exactly represented as
  the Arrow IPC file format on disk. V2 files support storing all Arrow
  data types as well as compression with LZ4 or ZSTD. V2 was first made
  available in Apache Arrow 0.17.0.</p>
  </blockquote>
  <p>While <a href="https://vaex.io/docs/api.html" rel="nofollow noreferrer">vaex</a>, which is an alternative to <code>pandas</code>, has two different functions, one for Arrow IPC and one for Feather. <a href="https://pola-rs.github.io/polars-book/api-python/polars/frame/DataFrame.html#polarsframedataframeread_ipc" rel="nofollow noreferrer">polars</a>, another pandas alternative, indicate that Arrow IPC and Feather are the same.</p>