Abstract

Recently many different programming languages have emerged for the development of bioinformatics applications. In addition to the traditional languages, languages from open source projects such as BioPerl, BioPython, and BioJava have become popular because they provide special tools for biological data processing and are easy to use. However, it is not well-studied which of these programming languages will be most suitable for a given bioinformatics task and which factors should be considered in choosing a language for a project. Like many other application projects, bioinformatics projects also require various types of tasks. Accordingly, it will be a challenge to characterize all the aspects of a project in order to choose a language. However, most projects require some common and primitive tasks such as file I/O, text processing, and basic computation for counting, translation, statistics, etc. This paper presents the benchmarking results of six popular languages, Perl, BioPerl, Python, BioPython, Java, and BioJava, for several common and simple bioinformatics tasks. The experimental results of each language are compared through quantitative evaluation metrics such as execution time, memory usage, and size of the source code. Other qualitative factors, including writeability, readability, portability, scalability, and maintainability, that affect the success of a project are also discussed. The results of this research can be useful for developers in choosing an appropriate language for the development of bioinformatics applications.