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@@ -16,43 +16,55 @@ In January 2024, we sent our first WDL Usage and Adoption Survey aimed to gather
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The WDL community is growing. Our community primarily considers themselves either a **bioinformatician (47%) or software engineer (37%)** (Fig 1). Of these users, 77% identify as from academia (Fig 2). While the WDL spec has been around for nearly a decade, it is clear that our community is growing. We see that **31% of users have picked it up in the last 1-3 years** (Fig 3).
To build and foster a sense of community, we wanted to know how our users interact with each other. Engagement with the WDL community is occasional at best (Fig 4), with the majority of users using platforms like GitHub Discussions or WDL Slack (Fig 5). Users expressed a desire for more opportunities to connect and share knowledge with fellow WDL users.
As important as a sense of community, it is important to highlight how and where our users run their workflows. The majority of participants identified **Cromwell (62%) as the leading WDL engine**, followed by MiniWDL (27%) and a variety of other engines (Fig 6). Over 76% of respondents indicated that they primarily run their workflows in the cloud natively or through platforms such as Terra, DNANexus, and Seven Bridges, which run on multiple cloud infrastructures (Fig 7). If they use the cloud natively, users overwhelmingly choose GCP (**61%**) over the other cloud providers (Fig 8).
Most users write their own WDL workflows. However, with a growing community, we find that many users look for examples or already developed workflows. Users tend to find workflows on **GitHub (48%)**, BioWDL or WARP, or on Dockstore (40%) (Fig 9). When developing workflows, **validation and linting tools are widely used, 80% of users rely on tools like MiniWDL and Womtool** (Fig 10). As with any developer, WDL users have a wide range of languages they prefer to write in for calling their tools. The most commonly used programming languages with WDL are **Python (36%), Bash (31%), and R (16%)** (Fig 11).
The future of WDL is seen with mixed opinions. While **50%** of users expect their usage of WDL to stay the same, **19%** foresee increasing usage, and another **22%** foresee switching to another workflow language (Fig 12).
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