[cmars]

I find this recommendation interesting because I am developing an OpenPGP keyserver in Go, called Hockeypuck (https://launchpad.net/hockeypuck). I started the project because of problems I ran into with SKS in a very specialized, write-heavy use case. SKS is developed in OCaml.

I've been porting the reconciliation algorithm in SKS to Golang so Hockeypuck can peer with SKS servers. I think it will be very useful in other applications beyond keyservers. The mathematical definitions of finite fields and polynomials are elegant in OCaml, and I definitely understand the choice of language from that point-of-view.

If you want to see a comparison of finite-field arithmetic and polynomial factoring in Go vs OCaml, my recon port is in a separate project called conflux (https://github.com/cmars/conflux). It's an incomplete work in progress, needs tightening up, tail-call elimination, etc. but early feedback is welcome.

As a developer unfamiliar with OCaml & without much formal mathematics background, I had a hard time understanding some of the intent of the SKS sources -- in those cases, conflux is a straight-up port from OCaml with unit-tests also ported from SKS to back it up. Some of it, I understood the math concept, but not the OCaml, so I ported from SymPy instead.

Wolfram Alpha was also helpful to validate my work and create test cases -- it does polynomial factoring over finite fields!