Hts-nim: Scripting high-performance genomic analyses

Abstract

Motivation: Extracting biological insight from genomic data inevitably requires custom software. In many cases, this is accomplished with scripting languages, owing to their accessibility and brevity. Unfortunately, the ease of scripting languages typically comes at a substantial performance cost that is especially acute with the scale of modern genomics datasets. Results: We present hts-nim, a high-performance library written in the Nim programming language that provides a simple, scripting-like syntax without sacrificing performance.