Architecture of NetCDF APIs and Libraries

9.7 Architecture of NetCDF APIs and Libraries

Knowing how netCDF APIs are layered is sometimes useful for understanding performance and error handling.

Layering architecture of netCDF C/C++/Fortran libraries and applications:

The C and Java implementations are independent. Java is not shown here.
All non-Java APIs call the C library.
The v2 layer is supported for backward compatibility, but is just a layer which calls the classic API.
Utilities ncdump, ncgen, and nccopy are written in C. (nc-config is a Bourne shell script, constructed by the netCDF configure script.
The Fortran-90 library calls C library through Fortran 77 API, which is a severe limitation for netCDF-4. Plans call for it to rewritten to use the Fortran 2003 C interoperability layer.