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> It's not the dumbest engineering data format I've seen It’s not, but should the models be binary, the format would be much better. > just use HDF5 Last tim
by Const-me 5y ago
> It's not the dumbest engineering data format I've seen
It’s not, but should the models be binary, the format would be much better.
> just use HDF5
Last time I checked (a few years ago), HDF5 was only possible to handle with the official C++ library. That library didn’t even support multithreading, when I tried to write 2 HDF5 files from 2 concurrent thread, the program crashed with broken data structures in some global variables deep inside the HDF5 library.
My computer has 16 hardware threads, the servers I’m targeting often have more of them, and I’d like to actually use that hardware. Single-threaded libraries aren’t OK in my books; not in 2021.
- formerly_proven 5y agoHDF5 supports parallel I/O with MPI, which works fine for HPC applications, but I can see how this might be a reason against HDF5.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- ggrrhh_ta 5y agoIt's a pity, also, some other limitations (for example with strings in HDF5 files, etc.). The format itself is to me, the closest to "the ultimate format", however, yes, library/tools support is a bit disappointing and it is sad. I came here to say that 3MF can be serialized into HDF5 - keeping the advantages of both, the textual description (which is much much more futureproof when one looks 10/15/20 years in the future) while having a one-to-one fast access counterpart.
- Const-me 5y ago> which is much much more futureproof when one looks 10/15/20 years in the future IMO the main reason why binary formats suffered from compatibility issues in the past was huge variations of hardware. We had little endian/big endian CPUs, 16/32/64 bit bitness, earlier in the past there were even weirder computers with non-two complement signed integers, or 12 bits in a memory word. By now we only have big endian CPUs. Vast majority of them are 64 bits. All of them are using IEEE floats, at least for FP64 and FP32 numbers; for FP16 there’re several versions, unfortunately. None of that is likely to change in 10 or 20 years. For applications where performance matters, like image and video codecs, we do have binary formats which are older than 20 years, still in wide use, with little to no compatibility issues. Examples are PNG from 1997, or Mpeg-4 from 1998.
- adgjlsfhk1 5y ago*little endian