Section: 5.7 Architecture of NetCDF APIs and Libraries

5.7 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-3 libraries and applications:

The C and Java implementations are independent.
Other APIs call C library.
Fortran-90 library could be modified to call C library directly, with some work, for not much benefit.
Support for netCDF-2 APIs for C and Fortran77 not shown, layered on top of netCDF-3 libraries to support legacy applications.