Hardwood 1.0 is a new Apache Parquet reader library for the JVM, built from scratch with no mandatory dependencies and multi-threaded page decoding by default. It targets Java 21+, is Apache 2.0 licensed, and available on Maven Central. The library offers two APIs: a row reader for ergonomic record access and a column reader for high-throughput analytical workloads. Benchmarks show Hardwood achieving 16.5M rows/sec on 8 vCPUs vs parquet-java's single-threaded approach, with consistent advantages in both full scans and predicate push-down scenarios. A CLI tool with an interactive TUI (hardwood dive) is also included, with native binaries for Linux, macOS, and Windows. Upcoming work includes Parquet write support in 1.1, Bloom filter support, encryption, and Apache Flink integration.
