I've had the opportunity to create a practical application in Go. I'm working on a research project in grad school that involves constructing character networks from literature text. After In order to get a grasp on what we might be able to "say" about networks in the corpus.
After pre-processing the text with Stanford's Named Entity Recognizer, I then searched the text for people, and began constructing the relationships. Details on the methods will be upcoming. First I wrote the processing code in R, and it took around 10 seconds to run. After rewriting in Go, the processing takes less than one second. I don't think it should be a surprise that it performs better. The important part is that this allows me to create a tool that will update parameters of the algorithm and update the network for display in real time.
Right now the display is being done in using D3's force layout. I think it should work out, but there are some kinks that I need to resolve first.
More to come.