Explanation and rationale

You might be wondering why RaGraph was even created with the existence of libraries such as networkx or graph-tool also populating the landscape. In part, it was the clear need to describe both hierarchies as well as regular relations between nodes, paired with rich, custom metadata that we wanted to store. Also, we had quite a palette of custom analysis methods we wanted to implement and clear access to a Graph's DSM at all times, which would have resulted in fairly custom object anyways.

Both of these reasons are partly due to the fact that we at Ratio CASE are a Systems Engineering company. We use our software intensively in that field and have grown to like having a proprietary implementation that we understand fully. It's a living library, catered to our needs in Systems Engineering.

For now, RaGraph is a pure Python library, but since we have been re-implementing some of our software in Rust, some backend parts might be slowly replaced with Rust wrappers. This often comes with speed benefits and limits chances of "misuse" as only the required parts would be exposed.