HTSlib: C library for reading/writing high-throughput sequencing data

Abstract

Since the original Samtools release, performance has been considerably improved, with a BAM read-write loop running 5 times faster and BAM to SAM conversion 13 times faster (both using 16 threads, compared to Samtools 0.1.19). Widespread adoption has seen HTSlib downloaded >1 million times from GitHub and conda. The C library has been used directly by an estimated 900 GitHub projects and has been incorporated into Perl, Python, Rust, and R, significantly expanding the number of uses via other languages. HTSlib is open source and is freely available from htslib.org under MIT/BSD license.