Comparison of Go, Java, and C++ for implementing elPrep

[Pascal Costanza]

Our paper on comparing Go, Java, and C++ for implementing elPrep has been published in BMC Bioinformatics.

Title: A comparison of three programming languages for a full-fledged next-generation sequencing tool

Authors: Pascal Costanza, Charlotte Herzeel, Wilfried Verachtert

URL: https://doi.org/10.1186/s12859-019-2903-5

Background:

elPrep is an established multi-threaded framework for preparing SAM and BAM files in sequencing pipelines. To achieve good performance, its software architecture makes only a single pass through a SAM/BAM file for multiple preparation steps, and keeps sequencing data as much as possible in main memory. Similar to other SAM/BAM tools, management of heap memory is a complex task in elPrep, and it became a serious productivity bottleneck in its original implementation language during recent further development of elPrep. We therefore investigated three alternative programming languages: Go and Java using a concurrent, parallel garbage collector on the one hand, and C++17 using reference counting on the other hand for handling large amounts of heap objects. We reimplemented elPrep in all three languages and benchmarked their runtime performance and memory use.

Results:

The Go implementation performs best, yielding the best balance between runtime performance and memory use. While the Java benchmarks report a somewhat faster runtime than the Go benchmarks, the memory use of the Java runs is significantly higher. The C++17 benchmarks run significantly slower than both Go and Java, while using somewhat more memory than the Go runs. Our analysis shows that concurrent, parallel garbage collection is better at managing a large heap of objects than reference counting in our case.

Conclusions:

Based on our benchmark results, we selected Go as our new implementation language for elPrep, and recommend considering Go as a good candidate for developing other bioinformatics tools for processing SAM/BAM data as well.