Alembic, a data transfer format for 3D graphics, especially high end VFX, also initially started with HDF5 but found it to have low performnance and was general

Alembic, a data transfer format for 3D graphics, especially high end VFX, also initially started with HDF5 but found it to have low performnance and was generally a bottleneck (especially in multithreaded contexts.) Luckily the authors of Alembic were smart and in their initial design abstracted out the HDF5 interface and were able to provide an alternative IO layer based on C++ STL streams. The C++ STL streams-based interface greatly outperformed the HDF5 layer. Details on that transition here: https://groups.google.com/forum/#!msg/alembic-discussion/FTG1HuuO_qA/jUadpxpk3IoJ https://groups.google.com/forum/#!msg/alembic-discussion/FTG...