# Developing Alternate Graph Types

This section is designed to guide developers who wish to write their own graph structures.

All Graphs functions rely on a standard API to function. As long as your graph structure is a subtype of AbstractGraph and implements the following API functions with the given return values, all functions within the Graphs package should just work:

If the graph structure is designed to represent weights on edges, the weights function should also be defined. Note that the output does not necessarily have to be a dense matrix, but it must be a subtype of AbstractMatrix{<:Real} and indexable via [u, v].

#### Note on inheriting from AbstractSimpleGraph

Every subtype of AbstractSimpleGraph must have vertices forming a UnitRange starting from 1 and return neighbors in ascending order. The extend to which code for graph types other than subtypes of AbstractSimpleGraph does not rely on AbstractSimpleGraph assumptions needs to be carefully checked, though in principle the requirement is only part of the AbstractSimpleGraph API.