netcdf

Planned, wave 2: NetCDF classic and NetCDF-4.

Status: planned (wave 2). No code exists. The package name is provisional.

What it will provide

NetCDF classic in its three variants (CDF-1, CDF-2 with 64-bit offsets and CDF-5): big-endian, with a record dimension.
NetCDF-4: HDF5 with dimension scales, the “classic model” subset, on top of h5.
The CF conventions’ units attribute, which is in the UDUNITS syntax; the planned units package of go-units parses it.

References

Subject	Reference
the formats	Unidata, NetCDF File Format Specification
conventions	the CF conventions

How it will be validated

Area	Criterion
reading	exact equality of the values read against the oracle
round trip	Go writes and netcdf-c reads, and the other way round, with identical arrays
hostile input	`go test -fuzz` for panics; a limit on the allocation a hostile header can ask for

Oracle: Unidata’s netcdf-c and its ncdump. Its test files are the corpus. Every item also needs unit tests at 100% coverage and a performance table against the reference.

Created on October 23, 2026 by tannevaled

Modified on October 23, 2026 by tannevaled