PyPI vs. Python vs. h5py vs. imageio Comparison Chart

PyPI is the official repository for Python software packages, hosting hundreds of thousands of projects that developers can publish and users can discover and install. It supports both source distributions (“sdists”) and pre-built binary “wheels”, allowing packages to include native extensions for different platforms. Projects on PyPI consist of multiple releases, each of which can include various files for different operating systems or Python versions. Metadata for each package includes things like version number, dependencies, licensing, classifiers, description (including rendering Markdown or reStructuredText), and other information that tools like pip use to resolve, download, and install the correct package. PyPI provides search and filtering based on package metadata, letting users find what they need via keywords, compatibility, or other package attributes.

The h5py package is a Pythonic interface to the HDF5 binary data format. It lets you store huge amounts of numerical data, and easily manipulate that data from NumPy. For example, you can slice into multi-terabyte datasets stored on disk, as if they were real NumPy arrays. Thousands of datasets can be stored in a single file, categorized and tagged however you want. H5py uses straightforward NumPy and Python metaphors, like dictionary and NumPy array syntax. For example, you can iterate over datasets in a file, or check out the .shape or .dtype attributes of datasets. You don't need to know anything special about HDF5 to get started. In addition to the easy-to-use high level interface, h5py rests on a object-oriented Cython wrapping of the HDF5 C API. Almost anything you can do from C in HDF5, you can do from h5py.