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Ask HN: Do you use Go in Neuroscience?
I have recently been working with Go and have wondered about its use in Neuroscience. I have been working on web things for a while now but previously I did Ph.D. work which included simulations of coupled neurons. These were dynamical simulations using things like the Hodgkin-Huxley model.
The concurrency in Go seems like it could be very useful when applied to the way neurons are connected. "Regular" parallelism may work fine but the ability to sync up different processes relatively easily with Go could be neat.
I'd love to hear from anyone else who has thought about this or done some Neuroscience work using Go.
- irremediable 11y agoI can speak a bit for the "no" camp. I work in medical imaging, so not neuroscience per se, but I know quite a few neuroscientists. Most of them are now working in Python, MATLAB and/or C++. IMO the (impassable?) barrier to using Go will be the existing infrastructure/libraries for those three languages. Even though you could use cgo... in my experience, most neuroscientists aren't that into fixing their tools. They'd rather be working on their models. (I could easily stand to be corrected. On a similar note, I hope Julia replaces MATLAB for a lot of science/engineering.)
- tedsanders 11y agoThe neuroscientist I live with mostly uses Python. He does computational work, analyzing voltage signals/spikes in the retina and trying to model neural circuits.
- MollyR 11y agoI know a few computational biologists. They mostly seem to prefer python and r though some are talking about julia.
- fundamental 11y agoI currently work on the ML side of neuroscience (EEG/LFP->classifications) and I can't say I've seen any significant projects out there using Go. Simulations seem to be mostly done in C, C++, python, matlab, etc. My own work is done in julia and I don't think that go has that big of an appeal in this space.