Commited data types

[Apollo3zehn]

Mail to Gerd Heber:

Commited Data Types do not work and it will take a while I think. Mainly because I think that support for this feature means PureHDF needs to expose all type information that HDF5 supports (e.g endianness and floating point precision, and so on).

But maybe that is not needed and instead I can simply offer a generic type like new H5CommitedDataType<MyComplicatedStruct>() and reuse the already existing type mapping algorithm. That would mean less or no control over commited days type details but it would integrate well with the main concepts of PureHDF and it would be easy to use (I only need to put some thought about how to design the API to make this commited data type reusable)

[Apollo3zehn]

The two prominent (not 100% orthogonal) use cases are:

• To document the use of datatypes in an HDF5 file. You can give them descriptive names and then use them throughout your code.
• To use as a shorthand for complex datatypes. You can always construct/discover the datatype at runtime, but that's code with little return. Just persist it once and then keep using it!