Static analysis-guided agentic AI translation enables Rust as a full stack bioinformatics language
TL;DR - This paper combines agentic AI with static analysis to translate legacy bioinformatics software into Rust. The approach could reduce technical debt while improving portability, safety, and performance.
- Evaluated translations on commonly used next-generation sequencing and imaging software.
- Provides prompts and supporting software for systematic code translation.
- The translated Bascet pipeline was ~80Ă— smaller, built ~10Ă— faster, and improved key-step performance by more than 3Ă—.
- Removing Unix dependencies enabled Bascet to run natively on Windows without containers.