Question - workflow language selection evaluation?

[tfmorris]

I noticed that you're switching from a homebrew DAG processor to WDL and was wondering if you did an evaluation of the various workflow languages/processors as part of that process. If so, is that evaluation available anywhere?

I've got a project that will be tackling a similar evaluation soon.

[kislyuk]

Thanks for your interest. While we did not do a formal evaluation, we did carefully look at possible alternatives including workflow management systems currently popular in bioinformatics (nextflow, CWL, snakemake) as well as reflow and airflow. We ended up using WDL and specifically the miniwdl runtime for a few reasons:

• WDL has undergone a comprehensive multilateral standard setting effort with an inclusive review process
• WDL has multiple independent production interpreter/runtime implementations
• The WDL language has clean, relatively well-defined abstractions between the language and its runtimes and infrastructure; these abstractions align cleanly with POSIX and cloud computing abstractions
• The miniwdl runtime has been designed for modularity and pluggability with well-defined plug-in interfaces, uses sustainable engineering practices, and has been extensively tested in production

@mlin may be able to add more context here.

[tfmorris]

Thanks. I guess I got my hopes up too much, hoping that you'd have already done my job for me -- although I can definitely understand why @mlin would be supportive of choosing miniwdl. :) My evaluation is for a commercial client, so I don't know how much I'll be able to share, but I'll see. It'd be nice to be able to build up a matrix of features, pros/cons, etc, so that projects don't always have to start their evaluations from scratch.