- A convenient high-level API for creating virtual datasets, HDF5 objects which act as a view over one or more real datasets (:issue:`1060`, :issue:`1126`). See :ref:`vds` for details.
- :class:`File` can now be constructed with a Python file-like object, making it easy to create an HDF5 file in memory using :class:`io.BytesIO` (:issue:`1061`, :issue:`1105`, :issue:`1116`). See :ref:`file_fileobj` for details.
- :class:`File` now accepts parameters to control the chunk cache (:issue:`1008`). See :ref:`file_cache` for details.
- New options to record the order of insertion for attributes and group entries. Iterating over these collections now follows insertion order if it was recorded, or name order if not (:issue:`1098`).
- A new method :meth:`Group.create_dataset_like` to create a new dataset with similar properties to an existing one (:issue:`1085`).
- Datasets can now be created with storage backed by external non-HDF5 files (:issue:`1000`).
- Lists or tuples of unicode strings can now be stored as HDF5 attributes (:issue:`1032`).
- Inspecting the view returned by
.keys()now shows the key names, for convenient interactive use (:issue:`1049`).
H5LTopen_file_imageas :func:`h5py.h5f.open_file_image` (:issue:`1075`).- External dataset storage functions
H5Pset_external,H5Pget_externalandH5Pget_external_countas methods on :class:`h5py.h5p.PropDCID` (:issue:`1000`).
- Fix reading/writing of float128 data (:issue:`1114`).
- Converting data to float16 when creating a dataset (:issue:`1115`).
Support for Python 3.3 has been dropped.
Support for Python 2.6 has been dropped.