Are you considering translating Bio-Formats to any other languages?

The community has expressed substantial interest in a fully native C/C++ solution for Bio-Formats. We are currently funded to develop complete and robust native Bio-Formats integration capabilities, and we aim to make Bio-Formats the single solution for scientific image access. We will do what is necessary to make that happen.

That said, there are many factors to consider when weighing potential solutions: performance, ease of use, integration, and many others. Our current assessment is that it would not be an efficient use of resources to create a full language translation of Bio-Formats to another language such as C or C++. It would be a project requiring thousands of person-hours that would be better spent improving the codebase we already have. Further, the advantages of Java are too numerous to justify switching completely to another language. While it would be possible (with prolonged effort) to provide the core Bio-Formats library in C or C++ with Java bindings on top, doing so would sacrifice Bio-Formats's platform independence and greatly complicate deployment, especially to Java-based systems such as ImageJ and OMERO. We also expect that a C or C++ version of Bio-Formats would offer no significant improvement in time performance.

Instead, there are several effective ways to harness Java code from other environments; see the Bio-Formats article on interfacing from non-Java code for details. We are committed to exploring and developing these methods further to make Bio-Formats work for as many applications as possible, and welcome community feedback and ideas on this issue.