Switch to HighFive for HDF access?

[chenel]

Users have reported weird shutdown behavior using newer versions of the HDF5 library than the 1.10.5 that we've been using. Errors like:

Sample HDF5 errors

HDF5-DIAG: Error detected in HDF5 (1.14.3) thread 0:
  #000: /Users/mueller/hdf5/src/H5D.c line 481 in H5Dclose(): can't decrement count on dataset ID
    major: Dataset
    minor: Unable to decrement reference count
  #001: /Users/mueller/hdf5/src/H5Iint.c line 1227 in H5I_dec_app_ref_always_close(): can't decrement ID ref count
    major: Object ID
    minor: Unable to decrement reference count

Moreover, FNAL's SciSoft group has stopped including the HDF5 C++ interface in UPS packages in newer versions.

Between these two things, it seems that we may need to consider switching HDF library backends. HighFive is probably the best option, but it will be fairly painful, I think, to switch out the backend 😢