<tt>morloc</tt> : a workflow language for multi-lingual programming under a common type system

A conventional scientific workflow consists of many applications with untyped data flowing between them. Each application builds an internal data structure from input files, performs an operation, and writes output files. In practice, there are many data formats and many flavors of each. Compensating for this requires either highly flexible parsers on the application side or extra interface code on the workflow side. Further, the idiosyncrasies of wrapped applications limit the expressiveness of workflow languages; higher order functions, generics, compound data structures, and type checking are not easily supported. An alternative approach is to create a workflow within a single programming language using native functions rather than standalone applications. This offers programmatic flexibility, but mostly limits usage to one language. To address this problem, we introduce morloc : a language that supports efficient function composition between languages under a common type system. morloc gives the workflow designer the power of a modern functional language while allowing the nodes of the workflow to be written freely in any supported language as idiomatic functions of native data types.