Well, to be honest, Go is not exactly a kid anymore. Go was born in 2008 and we can consider him as a teenager (in technological terms, of course). As a “child”, this language has gone unnoticed, but as a “teenager”, it comes loaded with appeal and freshness .
We are not going to go into technical details about what differentiates Go from its siblings like C, C ++, Python, Perl, or Ruby . If you want to know something more in that sense, we recommend that you take a tour of their online tour, or read this other post of mine. We are going to focus on his stealthy, but steadfast step in science.
Go has been conceived for the multicore world and the execution of processes and operations in parallel. It therefore seems like an ideal development environment for scientific computation . However, where it has initially made the most impression is in the world of service-oriented apps (backends) as an alternative to Python, Node or Ruby.
But as we said, Go’s footprint for basic science is firm. Let’s look at some examples:
Go is increasingly being introduced to CERN and the high-energy physics around the LHC. More and more talks are being given about Go packages related to parallel and matrix calculus . The go-hep package is the strongest proof of this. For example, it is now possible to decode with Go the SLHA format of the supersymmetry calculation files (SUSY).
Go is also rumored to be behind SpaceX shuttle telemetry. Yes, it is true that they are having a hard time fulfilling their mission of landing back on an aircraft carrier, but I do not think it is the fault of Google’s creation. On the contrary, in this video you can see the first successful landing of a SpaceX (April 8, 2016) and if you look at the upper right corner, you will see Go’s contribution in the telemetry panel.
And finally, here is a compilation of libraries for Go oriented to mathematics, datamining and science.
Nothing else: pay attention to Go … if you are learning to program, it may become your native language.
Alberto Corbi is a professor at the Higher School of Engineering and Technology (ESIT) of the International University of La Rioja (UNIR).
