HDF5 version 1.14.4-2 released on 2024-04-15

This is a maintenance release with a few changes and updates:

• Added support for _Float16 16-bit floating-point datatype

  Support for the 16-bit floating-point _Float16 C type has been added to HDF5. On platforms where this type is available, this can enable more efficient storage of floating-point data when an application doesn't need the precision of larger floating-point datatypes. It can also allow for improved performance when converting between 16-bit floating-point data and data of another HDF5 datatype.

• Improved type conversion performance

  As a part of the _Float16 work, the type conversion code was overhauled, which has improved the performance of type conversion code. The speedup varies depending on the datatypes involved, but can be upwards of 10x for compound types and 100x when converting floats to integers where the library doesn't have a fast conversion path available from the compiler.

• Added improvements for cloud-optimized HDF5

  As a part of our continued push to improve access to HDF5 files stored in the cloud, we've added a few things to make working with cloudy HDF5 files more efficient:

  • Page buffering setup is now more tolerant of being used with HDF5 files that did not use paged storage. This avoids having to open/close/re-open the file to determine appropriate page buffering settings.

  • Added support for temporary credentials with the read-only S3 VFD

• Added build system improvements

  We are always working to ensure that HDF5 can be built on a wide variety of systems with the latest compilers. In this release, we've incorporated some improvements, including:

  • Further improvements to cross-compiling
  • Support for the new standards-compliant MSVC preprocessor
  • Better support for Cygwin and MinGW, particularly with the Autotools
  • Many other build system tweaks

  If you have a system that has problems building HDF5, please let us know on the HDF Group Forum (https://forum.hdfgroup.org/)

• Fixed many CVE issues

  Many soon-to-be-reported CVE issues were fixed in this release. These are similar to previously reported CVE issues in that they involve file parsing errors that generally result in a segfault. They are usually rated as medium severity by NIST. These issues do not have official CVE numbers yet.

  With these fixes, HDF5 will once again be CVE-free.

• The release tag in GitHub will be hdf5_1.14.4

  We used to use tags with names like hdf5-1_14_3, but we've been informed that dashes are forbidden in version strings by many package management schemes. If a patch release is necessary, we'll simply append another dot and number - e.g. hdf5_1.14.4.2 (instead of our previous hdf5-1_14_4-2).

• Many other improvements and bugfixes!

  Please see the full release notes for detailed information regarding this release, including a detailed list of changes.