I think first would be to support such things in VTK readers if the file has that support built in. Questions I have (because I don’t know the answer to them):
- Is there an index table in the compressed data stream somewhere? How do I know which hunk has byte N in it to even do random access? How do I know to ask for byte N in the first place? This is essentially a new file format though since the index table would also appear in a standard stream (AFAIK).
- What file formats that are compressed that VTK (natively) supports even make sense with random access? (I say natively since things like HDF5 would need to somehow do this through libhdf5 APIs and that’s too much work I expect.)
- How do we ensure that we’re not expecting such files to always have this random access? This fallback path seems like it’s going to get ignored in tests and bitrot.
I probably have other questions, but it’s a bit early right now.