Low: perceived portability

Exchange format portability:

• own format vs. something we already have libs for
• existing lib problems:
  • licensing issues
  • programming language
  • lib size, dependencies and portability
  • new dependency on 3rd party
• minimal implementation requirements
• alternative: custom format that is easy to implement anywhere
  • plain text, positional
  • plain text, named fields
  • plain text, s-expression

Example: tEDAx reference implementation

language	size in sloc
C	66
AWK	29
python3	64
welltype	72 (estimated)