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>To: address@hidden >cc: address@hidden (John Lewis) >From: "John B. Lewis" <address@hidden> >Subject: netCDF 3.4 question >Organization: NOAA/FSL >Keywords: 199805261759.LAA14456 Hi John, > I have been working with netCDF 3.4 and linking it with our existing > netCDF programs. All of our existing netCDF software is written using > the netCDF 2.x function calls. I have not experienced any problems > with linking or running these programs on SGI or Solaris platforms. > > My concerns are: > > 1) Will future releases of netCDF also be backward compatable with > netCDF 2.x? It's our intention to continue to support the interfaces people find most useful, so we don't have any immediate plans to stop supporting the netCDF 2.x interface, though we won't be extending it or providing a Fortran-90 version of the 2.x interface. The newer 3.x interface has some attractive features, but if the benefits aren't worth the cost of converting, you can stay with the 2.x interface. The 2.x interface is now written in terms of the 3.x interface, so if the 3.x interface works, the 2.x interface should also. > 2) If not, when will incompatability become an issue? Incompatibility may possibly become an issue when trying to make applications that use netCDF 2.x interfaces thread-safe on multi-CPU architectures, so you can get the benefits of parallel execution. There are problems with the 2.x interfaces that make it not worth the effort to try to make them thread-safe. (The 3.x implementation is not yet thread-safe either, but we think it will be fairly easy to make it thread-safe.) --Russ _____________________________________________________________________ Russ Rew UCAR Unidata Program address@hidden http://www.unidata.ucar.edu