Show HN: Xorq – open compute catalog for AI

Show HN: Xorq – open compute catalog for AI(github.com)

36 points by mousematrix 293 days ago | 11 comments

Hi HN, Hussain and Dan from Xorq here.

After years of struggling with scaling compute that worked in notebooks but failed in production, we decided to do something about it. Data has standards like Iceberg and Delta. But compute is still a mess—trapped in notebooks, duplicated effort across teams, or baked into custom Airflow DAGs. We think of Xorq as the missing analog to Apache Iceberg, but for compute.

We’ve spent the last year building Xorq, an *compute catalog* that helps teams *reuse, ship, and observe* transformations, features, models, and pipelines across engines.

Xorq is built on:

- *Arrow Flight* (`do_exchange`) for high-speed data transport - *Ibis* for cross-engine expression trees, serialized to YAML - A portable UDF engine that compiles pipelines to SQL or Python - `uv` to make Python environments fully reproducible

Xorq features:

- pandas-style declarative transformations, backed by Ibis - Multi-engine execution (e.g., DuckDB, Snowflake) - UDFs as portable Flight endpoints - Serveable transforms by way of flight_udxf operator - Built-in caching and lineage tracking - Diff-able YAML artifacts, great for CI/CD

Xorq use cases:

Since our last major release, it’s been exciting to see the first Xorq use-cases show up in the wild. All with *Python simplicity and SQL-scale performance*.

- Feature Stores (https://www.xorq.dev/blog/featurestore-to-featurehouse) - Semantic Layers (e.g. https://github.com/boringdata/boring-semantic-layer) - MCP + ML Integration (https://docs.xorq.dev/vignettes/mcp_flight_server)

We’re open source and learning fast. Would love feedback on what’s useful or missing. Thanks in advance for trying it out!

Check out the demo of the Xorq CLI tool in action: https://asciinema.org/a/730484

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Get Started

- Github: https://github.com/xorq-labs/xorq - Xorq docs: https://docs.xorq.dev/ ---

Sneak peak - Xorq Compute Catalog UI Console:

Check out this interactive Claude demo showing how the Xorq compute catalog can be visualized to accelerate composition, reuse, and troubleshooting of AI compute: https://claude.ai/public/artifacts/d2f00d2a-a3f9-4032-884e-d...

WhatsName 293 days ago |

The name is to easily confused with xorg and people already have a hard time telling groq and grok appart.

I would suggest rebranding if you just released it.

jmclnx 293 days ago | |

I agree, I saw Xorq and with the font I have, it looked like Xorg.

No offense, but I avoid AI like a plague, so I saw this I thought "WHY?", thinking it was X11 (Xorg).

Now a bit of a rant. Why or why do people have to use X??? for their products, time to come up with something else. If I was the Xorg foundation I would have sued Twitter. And I would have sent a letter to the smaller tech people using X for their product :)

mousematrix 293 days ago | | |

this is really useful. In our case, we are inspired by a terminal game called Zork, which is an Activision trademark. So, we tried to be creative and replacing Z with X made sense at the time. Of course, we did not want to be like any "dork", hence the Q.

Now I read this tought process above, I think this leaves much to be desired.

mousematrix 293 days ago | |

great point...honestly this will be our 3rd rebrand, but worth considering. I am just hoping that we are in a different enough space that it could slide....

stuaxo 293 days ago | | |

Yeah, please don't stick with Xorq, it's so visually similar to Xorg, it looks like the bottom of the g didn't render, which is totally possible on the web.

v3ss0n 292 days ago |

But why yaml?

mousematrix 292 days ago | |

As opposed to Substrait? I think there is certainly a path to converting to Substrait as one of the outputs for on-the-wire format to send query plans to various engines. YAML as such gives a human-diffable representation that can be checked-in to git. Let me know your thoughts...we are super early so happy to take in feedback...