An HDF5 based clone of 'pickle', with a twist: instead of serializing to a pickle file, Hickle dumps to an HDF5 file (Hierarchical Data Format). It is designed to be a "drop-in" replacement for pickle (for common data objects), but is really an amalgam of 'h5py' and 'pickle' with extended functionality.

That is: 'hickle' is a neat little way of dumping Python variables to HDF5 files that can be read in most programming languages, not just Python. Hickle is fast, and allows for transparent compression of your data (LZF / GZIP).