Potential projects for the Google Summer of Code or beyond.

Add support for bfloat16

• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bfloat16_floating-point_format
• Adding a new pixel type might be tricky, and may present backwards compatibility issues.

Add a Part Type That is Only Metadata 

• Could be useful for managing metadata in motion picture pipelines

A Fast Header Read

• A way to read just the header attributes you need, and nothing else.

Add Support for Sorting of Attributes

• Currently, attributes are written and read in alphabetical order in the file, and stored alphabetically internally. 
• But sometimes it would be convenient to organize and present them in the API, or GUI's, in a logical, non-alphabetical order.
• This might be done by adding an "order" attribute

Convert boost::python Imath Bindings to pybind11

• To eliminate Imath's dependency on boost/boost_python.

Explore Other Compression Schemes. 

• http://facebook.github.io/zstd/

Performance Metric Suite

• Implement a mechanism for quantifying read/write and compress/decompress times

A New Spectral Attribute Type

• Following up on Alban Fichet's spectral image storage presentation: https://hal.inria.fr/hal-03252797

Switch C++ API to Use the New C Core

• Retrofit the existing C++ API to use the new thread-safe C API underneath