bistro is an OCaml library to build and run computations represented by a collection of interdependent scripts, as is often found in data analysis (especially computational biology).

Features:

• build complex and composable workflows declaratively
• simple and lightweight wrapping of new components
• resume-on-failure: if something fails, fix it and the workflow will restart from where it stopped
• parallel workflow execution (locally or over a PBS cluster)
• development-friendly: when a script is modified, bistro automatically finds out what needs to be recomputed
• automatic naming of generated files
• static typing: detect file format errors at compile time!

The library provides a datatype to represent scripts (including metadata and dependencies), an engine to run workflows and a standard library providing components for popular tools (although mostly related to computational biology and unix for now).