Re: Guix Workflow Language ?

[Ricardo Wurmus]

zimoun <address@hidden> writes:

> Currently, GWL is the strongest available about env/deps management.
> However, Lisp is not mainstream, especially with Bio* and few
> pieces/workflow are already available.

Well, things can change.  Did you know that Ross Ihaka of GNU R fame has
been thinking out loud about a Lisp system as a successor to R?

See https://www.stat.auckland.ac.nz/%7Eihaka/downloads/Compstat-2008.pdf
and https://www.stat.auckland.ac.nz/%7Eihaka/downloads/JSM-2010.pdf

A lisp dialect is used in one of the most impressive editors, and lispy
languages have seen something of a renaissance with Clojure (also check
out Kawa), the rise of Racket, and possibly the appearance of Guix ;)

It’s not mainstream *yet*, but what becomes mainstream is really
determined by users who demonstrate that the tool is up to the task.

> From my point of view, GWL is two sides:
>  - the Guix Workflow, the engine of worklows which is already awesome !!
>  - the Workflow Language, the lisp EDSL which is hard to buy for the
>  non-lispers.

The two are closely linked.  Workflows in the GWL are described as
Scheme values, exactly as packages in Guix are Scheme values.  What
emerges from these linked values is a graph.  In the case of Guix that’s
a huge network of software, whereas in the GWL the graph is an
executable workflow.

> Last, I do not understand how 2 workflow engines can co-exist. It is
> error-prone and a spaghetti plate that I will not eat. :-)

The GWL describes the relations between processes as workflows.  An
execution engine then makes sense of workflows, e.g. by running its
processes on a cluster, spawning individual processes in isolated
environments (“containers!”), pre-processing the data inputs
(e.g. fetching files from a data repository or checking for staleness),
… these things are really independent of the workflows themselves.

But you really do need to have that network of processes first, and
that’s what the GWL builds up as a live datastructure from Scheme
values.  And that’s why it’s much less useful to try to compile a CWL
definition to the GWL — you’d lose most of the features the GWL can
provide.

> Happy FOSDEM !! (for people who are going)
> Hope that nice ideas will be discussed during the GWL session. :-)

I’ll be there and ready for a chat :)

--
Ricardo

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