@ Krux02 As bpr remarked, the library is really about strings - especially large ones. One key application is searching, both exact and approximate, but I have also started adding similarity measures for strings, and data structures such as suffix arrays have many other applications (for example the Burrows-Wheeler transform can be used in string compression).
Not everything is there yet, but I hope to cover a few more topics and be able to make it work on data on disk for the cases where the datasets are too big with respect to the available memory. It just happens that bioinformatics is a sector where large strings are particularly prevalent, but it is not the only one. The library could as well be used to, well, do actual searching - that is finding stuff in large text corpora - or finding recurrent patterns in time series - e.g. the latest 100 data points follow a pattern of UP UP DOWN ... has a similar pattern ever appeared before? About the issue you linked, I am not sure what to comment on. I started writing spills because I found it convenient to have some kind of disk based sequence, and it was pretty easy to do by memory mapping files. I called it like this because when memory is scarce you can just spill the sequence to disk. The topic discussed there does not seem to have anything to do with memory-mapped data structures, but maybe I am misunderstanding your remark
