After recent twitter discussions about usable software, I thought that one thing I could do to relieve a common problem of users of my software would be to build static binaries. I know this would be helpful because I never get any questions/bugs about installs with vcfanno or indexcov for which I provide static binaries (thanks to use of #golang) even though they are (I think) widely used. Since most of my tools are command-line apps, that rely on htslib this can be difficult.

hts-nim is a library that allows one to use htslib via the nim programming language. Nim is a garbage-collected language that compiles to C and often has similar performance. I have become very productive in nim and especially in hts-nim and there are by now, at least a few other users of hts-nim. This post is to show how one particular feature of nim enables users to write their own functions that will be used no differently than hts-nim’s provided functionality.