HighFive: An Easy-To-Use, Header-Only C++ Library for HDF5 – Luc Grosheintz, Nicolas Cornu, EPFL

Presented by Luc Grosheintz, Nicolas Cornu, EPFL – Blue Brain Project

Portable scientific data formats are vital for reliable data storage, knowledge transfer, and long-term maintainability and reproducibility. Hierarchical Data Format (HDF) 5 is considered the de-facto standard for this purpose in various domains within academia as well as industry. While the official HDF5 library is versatile and well supported, it only provides a low-level C/C++ interface. Lacking proper high-level C++ abstractions dissuades the use of HDF5 in many scientific applications. There are a number of C++ wrapper libraries available. Many, however, are domain-specific, incomplete or not actively maintained.