12 · The tooling galaxy

Status: stub. Deliberately a map, not a deep dive.

Around the core spec sits a constellation of tools newcomers keep hearing about. This chapter is a labeled map, not a tutorial for any one of them.

What this chapter will cover

• A single diagram placing the major tools relative to core Zarr.
• One sentence each on: Icechunk (transactional storage + versioning), VirtualiZarr (Zarr views over existing files), xarray (labeled arrays), dask (parallel compute), kerchunk (reference files).
• Which of these are stores, which are consumers, and which are neither.
• Pointers out: each tool gets a "learn more" link rather than a deep dive here.