Results from the 2025 Go Developer Survey - The Go Programming Language

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Todd Kulesza, on behalf of the Go team 21 January 2026
Hello! In this article we’ll discuss the results of the 2025 Go Developer Survey, conducted during September 2025.
Thank you to the 5,379 Go developers who responded to our survey invitation this year. Your feedback helps both the Go team at Google and the wider Go community understand the current state of the Go ecosystem and prioritize projects for the year ahead.
Our three biggest findings are:
Read on for the details about these findings, and much more.
Most survey respondents self-identified as professional developers (87%) who use Go for their primary job (82%). A large majority also uses Go for personal or open-source projects (72%). Most respondents were between 25 – 45 years old (68%) with at least six years of professional development experience (75%). Going deeper, 81% of respondents told us they had more professional development experience than Go-specific experience, strong evidence that Go is usually not the first language developers work with. In fact, one of the themes that repeatedly surfaced during this year’s survey analysis seems to stem from this fact: when the way to do a task in Go is substantially different from a more familiar language, it creates friction for developers to first learn the new (to them) idiomatic Go pattern, and then to consistently recall these differences as they continue to work with multiple languages. We’ll return to this theme later.
The single most common industry respondents work in was “Technology” (46%), but a majority of respondents work outside of the tech industry (54%). We saw representation of all sizes of organizations, with a bare majority working somewhere with 2 – 500 employees (51%), 9% working alone, and 30% working at enterprises of over 1,000 employees. As in prior years, a majority of responses come from North America and Europe.
This year we observed a decrease in the proportion of respondents who said they were fairly new to Go, having worked with it for less than one year (13%, vs. 21% in 2024). We suspect this is related to industry-wide declines in entry-level software engineering roles; we commonly hear from people that they learned Go for a specific job, so a downturn in hiring would be expected to reduce the number of developers learning Go in that year. This hypothesis is further supported by our finding that over 80% of respondents learned Go after beginning their professional career.
Other than the above, we found no significant changes in other demographics since our 2024 survey.
The vast majority of respondents (91%) said they felt satisfied while working with Go. Almost ⅔ were “very satisfied”, the highest rating. Both of these metrics are incredibly positive, and have been stable since we began asking this question in 2019. The stability over time is really what we monitor from this metric — we view it as a lagging indicator, meaning by the time this satisfaction metric shows a meaningful change, we would expect to already have seen earlier signals from issue reports, mailing lists, or other community feedback.
Why were respondents so positive about Go? Looking at open-text responses to several different survey questions suggests that it’s the gestalt, rather than any one thing. These folks are telling us that they find tremendous value in Go as a holistic platform. That doesn’t mean it supports all programming domains equally well (it surely does not), but that developers’ value the domains it does nicely support via stdlib and built-in tooling.
Below are some representative quotations from respondents. To provide context for each quote, we also identify the satisfaction level, years of experience with Go, and industry of the respondent.
“Go is by far my favorite language; other languages feel far too complex and unhelpful. The fact that Go is comparatively small, simple, with fewer bells and whistles plays a massive role in making it such a good long-lasting foundation for building programs with it. I love that it scales well to being used by a single programmer and in large teams.” — Very satisfied / 10+ years / Technology company
“The entire reason I use Go is the great tooling and standard library. I’m very thankful to the team for focusing on great HTTP, crypto, math, sync, and other tools that make developing service-oriented applications easy and reliable.” — Very satisfied / 10+ years / Energy company
“[The] Go ecosystem is the reason why I really like the programming language. There are a lot of npm issues lately but not with Go.” — Very satisfied / 3 – 10 years / Financial services
This year we also asked about the other languages that people use. Survey respondents said that besides Go, they enjoy working with Python, Rust, and TypeScript, among a long tail of other languages. Some shared characteristics of these languages align with common points of friction reported by Go developers, including areas like error handling, enums, and object-oriented design patterns. For example, when we sum the proportion of respondents who said their next-favorite language included one of the following factors, we found that majorities of respondents enjoy using languages with inheritance, type-safe enums, and exceptions, with only a bare majority of these languages including a static type system by default.
We think this is important because it reveals the larger environment in which developers operate — it suggests that peo