2025 Roadmap

[MarcoGorelli]

I'm opening this to give a bit more visibility to the ecosystem about our plans

I have 3 main goals for 2025:

1. Adoption: keep looking out for project which might benefit from Narwhals, and help with Narwhalifying them. So far, each time we've done it, it's highlighted several areas of improvement. I think it's the most valuable kind of contribution. For anyone interested in contributing to Narwhals, trying to Narwhalify a project and then addressing any shortcomings in Narwhals is probably the best way to get started
2. Laziness: most (all?) libraries currently using Narwhals are using eager execution. We should aim to have a solid lazy-only layer of support, which DuckDB and PySpark could fall into. Initially, this should exclude all row-order-dependent operations
3. Standardisation: I'd like to aim to publish a subset of the Narwhals spec in JOSS. If we publish that, along with a reference implementation, then it should provide any dataframe library with the tools such that they can become Narwhals-compliant

Keep in mind that this is a community-driven project. Some of us do get some limited amount of time to contribute during work hours - and we're very grateful for this - but there's no Narwhals company or anything like that