HDF5 C Code generation

Question

I was wondering if there were a tool able to produce C HDF5 read and write code from C data structure.

I would like that tool to parse a C header file and generate the corresponding C HDF5 read/write code.

One can distinguish the case of static allocation and dynamic allocation. In a first time, I would only be interested in static allocation.

For example, I would like to generate the following code from the definition of the structure sensor_t, that contains one int and two doubles. The code displayed is the direct conversion of a typedef C struct to a C HDF5 structure.

typedef struct {
    int     serial_no;
    double  temperature;
    double  pressure;
} sensor_t;

#include "hdf5.h"
hid_t memtype;
herr_t      status;
memtype = H5Tcreate (H5T_COMPOUND, sizeof (sensor_t));
status = H5Tinsert (memtype, "serial_no",    HOFFSET (sensor_t, serial_no), H5T_NATIVE_INT);
status = H5Tinsert (memtype, "temperature",  HOFFSET (sensor_t, temperature), H5T_NATIVE_DOUBLE);
status = H5Tinsert (memtype, "pressure",     HOFFSET (sensor_t, pressure), H5T_NATIVE_DOUBLE);


sensor_t    wdata[1];
status = H5Dread (dset, memtype, H5S_ALL, H5S_ALL, H5P_DEFAULT, rdata);
status = H5Dwrite (dset, memtype, H5S_ALL, H5S_ALL, H5P_DEFAULT, wdata);

I have looked on the hdf website without success

http://www.hdfgroup.org

I know some have tried for HDF4 with a Perl script

http://www.srl.caltech.edu/ACE/ASC/exhdfgen/index.htm

Answer 1

Interesting. In NetCDF land there is "ncgen". NetCDF-4 introduced the idea of compound types. NetCDF4 also can use the HDF5 file format as the underlying container format.

So, it won't take a C header file, but the 'CDL' markup is pretty simple:

netcdf demo {
types:
  compound mything {
    int id ;
    double d1 ;
    double d2 ;
  }; // mything
dimensions:
        d1 = 1 ;
variables:
        mything v1(d1) ;

// global attributes:

Then you can make netcdf C code out of that:

ncgen -c mine.cdl

It's not exactly what you want. It's not really what you want at all, but it's probably the closest you can get right now.