statrs VS Rust-Bio

statrs for working with probability distributions and statistics.

Does anyone know of zig native libraries for bioinformatics (here is a Rust example https://rust-bio.github.io/ )? It seems as though one could pull in a lot of bioinformatics C libraries such as done with https://github.com/brentp/hts-zig.

e.g. Rust-Bio

I would start with the book and then rust-bio library. Rust is a pretty low level language compared to R/Python. It’s an especially good fit for writing efficient tools that make use of the kinds of algorithms / data structures that are implemented in rust-bio.

Absolutely! It already is, e.g., https://github.com/rust-bio/rust-bio. I'm moving from the academia/nonprofit world into industry bioinformatics, and I intend to use Rust as much as possible. I've already replaced as much of my Python as possible with Rust. I feel I'm able to create larger, more complex programs with Rust because I have the compiler to keep me from making common mistakes that are so easy to make in dynamically typed languages like Perl and Python. It might take longer to write a program initially, but I've started to create a library of functions I can paste together to do things like parse a positive integer, find a bunch of files with a certain file extension, search through data for a pattern, parse CSV files, etc. Writing my latest book has provided even more common patterns I keep finding I use over and over.

I think there is huge potential for Rust in bioinformatics, and there are already some great projects like https://rust-bio.github.io/. It seems industry is also hiring for these skills. This Nature article is a little old, but also covers why people in the field are looking for greater safety and performance. It's relatively easy to write a Python program to do bio stuff, but it's also very easy to get lots of things wrong or for the resulting program to be slow and/or impossible to extend and maintain. In the long run, I think it makes sense to write in Rust. Perl was king in biofx when I started, and I would not have predicted it being displaced by Python, so there's good reason to believe that Python may one day be eclipsed by Rust.

Well, someone mentioned https://rust-bio.github.io/

So generally stuff in this maths/numerical space. The term is a bit deceptive because it rarely means domain-specific science libraries like rust-bio even thought that might be what you think when you hear "scientific computing".