Contributing

DIAMOND is an active community project, and you are invited to contribute to it. You may fork it on GitHub, develop changes and improvements, and submit a pull request. I stand ready to review and merge any sensible pull requests.

For substantial changes, I would recommend you to seek discussion with me in advance so I can give you feedback about what makes sense in my book. Drop me an email or live chat on Discord.

Do not fork this project off into your own personal version of DIAMOND and try to promote it as an alternative. Feed back your changes into the mainline and let the community benefit from them immediately. Great software is built as a community effort, not by fracturing it into god-knows-how-many forks that all claim to be better than the others. Use my knowledge and let's build something great together.

About the memory safety concept of Rust, that is relevant for many systems, but not such much for bioinformatics tools. DIAMOND is just fine in C++. You can trust me on this, I'm a veteran with decades of experience, not a self-appointed expert who can prompt an AI. Do not rewrite something into a new language just because it's cool and fashionable.

I will give due recognition to anybody who contributes to this work, including authorship on future publications.

• Benjamin J. Buchfink, creator and developer of DIAMOND