I'm delighted to finally post an official announcement of our package for high-throughput sequencing (HTS), also called Next-generation sequencing (NGS): `dhtslib`. It's not a very clever name, and we are working on a new one. ;)

https://github.com/blachlylab/dhtslib/
https://code.dlang.org/packages/dhtslib

Once upon a time, BioD[1] was fairly active, but I am afraid D is not heavily used in bioinformatics and computational biology, especially in high-throughput (genome) sequencing applications when compared to its peers.[2] However, our group (cancer genomics) has found D an ideal language which is easy to pick up for Python programmers and yet retains powerful features for C/C++ programmers.

`dhtslib` began as a thin wrapper over the ubiquitous, but very low-level and hard to use `htslib` C library (https://github.com/samtools/htslib/). We use `dhtslib` extensively in both public and private projects for computational biology, and over the years it has grown from simply a (huge) set of `extern (C)` definitions to a fully featured, RAII-enabled genome sequencing focused bioinformatics package. If you are working in this field, or know someone open to D who works in this field, I strongly encourage you to point them at `dhtslib`!

 * `htslib` namespace with complete bindings to htslib
 * `dhtslib` namespace with high level object-oriented interfaces, many using underlying htslib calls for high performance, but via convenient and idiomatic D including RAII, Forward ranges, etc.
 * htslib-backed read/write of SAM/BAM/CRAM, VCF/BCF
 * Readers for BED and GFF3/GTF (not part of htslib)
 * FASTQ streamer
 * CIGAR manipulations

The next version, v0.13.0, adds a novel feature "Typesafe Coordinates", which I'll post about separately in a moment!

Kind regards

James S Blachly, MD
The Ohio State University

[0] https://github.com/blachlylab/dhtslib/
    https://code.dlang.org/packages/dhtslib
[1] https://github.com/biod/BioD
[2] Here is a contemporary example of D used in high-throughput sequencing: DENTIST by Arne Ludwig at Max Planck institute
    https://github.com/a-ludi/dentist -- if you know of more, please let me know!

On Wednesday, 1 September 2021 at 05:27:38 UTC, James Blachly wrote:
> I'm delighted to finally post an official announcement of our package for high-throughput sequencing (HTS), also called Next-generation sequencing (NGS): `dhtslib`. It's not a very clever name, and we are working on a new one. ;)
>
> https://github.com/blachlylab/dhtslib/
>
> [...]
>
> [2] Here is a contemporary example of D used in high-throughput sequencing: DENTIST by Arne Ludwig at Max Planck institute
>     https://github.com/a-ludi/dentist

I am surprised to see the use of DMD (see the Dockerfile). If you want runtime performance, the first thing I would do is switch to LDC or GDC.

Perhaps DENTIST's particular use of D and dhtslib is mainly forwarding calls to htslib (C) and thus D performance is not relevant?

-Johan

On Thursday, 2 September 2021 at 10:32:19 UTC, Johan wrote:
> On Wednesday, 1 September 2021 at 05:27:38 UTC, James Blachly
>> [2] Here is a contemporary example of D used in high-throughput sequencing: DENTIST by Arne Ludwig at Max Planck institute
>>     https://github.com/a-ludi/dentist
>
> I am surprised to see the use of DMD (see the Dockerfile). If you want runtime performance, the first thing I would do is switch to LDC or GDC.
>
> Perhaps DENTIST's particular use of D and dhtslib is mainly forwarding calls to htslib (C) and thus D performance is not relevant?


DENTIST is someone else's unrelated project that does not to my knowledge use `dhtslib`.