Go Developer Survey 2024 H2 Results - The Go Programming Language

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Alice Merrick 20 December 2024
Go was designed with a focus on developer experience, and we deeply value the feedback we receive through proposals, issues, and community interactions. However, these channels often represent the voices of our most experienced or engaged users, a small subset of the broader Go community. To ensure we’re serving developers of all skill levels, including those who may not have strong opinions on language design, we conduct this survey once or twice a year to gather systematic feedback and quantitative evidence. This inclusive approach allows us to hear from a wider range of Go developers, providing valuable insights into how Go is used across different contexts and experience levels. Your participation is critical in informing our decisions about language changes and resource allocation, ultimately shaping the future of Go. Thank you to everyone who contributed, and we strongly encourage your continued participation in future surveys. Your experience matters to us.
This post shares the results of our most recent Go Developer Survey, conducted from September 9–23, 2024. We recruited participants from the Go blog and through randomized prompts in the VS Code Go plug-in and GoLand IDE, allowing us to recruit a more representative sample of Go developers. We received a total of 4,156 responses. A huge thank you to all those who contributed to making this possible.
Along with capturing sentiments and challenges around using Go and Go tooling, our primary focus areas for this survey were on uncovering sources of toil, challenges to performing best practices, and how developers are using AI assistance.
Overall satisfaction remains high in the survey with 93% of respondents saying they were somewhat or very satisfied with Go during the last year. Although the exact percentages fluctuate slightly from cycle to cycle, we do not see any statistically significant differences from our 2023 H2 or 2024 H1 Surveys when the satisfaction rate was 90% and 93%, respectively.
The open comments we received on the survey continue to highlight what developers like most about using Go, for example, its simplicity, the Go toolchain, and its promise of backwards compatibility:
“I am a programming languages enjoyer (C-like) and I always come back to Go for its simplicity, fast compilation and robust toolchain. Keep it up!”
“Thank you for creating Go! It is my favorite language, because it is pretty minimal, the development cycle has rapid build-test cycles, and when using a random open source project written in Go, there is a good chance that it will work, even 10 years after. I love the 1.0 compatibility guarantee.”
Consistent with previous years, most survey respondents develop with Go on Linux (61%) and macOS (59%) systems. Historically, the proportion of Linux and macOS users has been very close, and we didn’t see any significant changes from the last survey. The randomly sampled groups from JetBrains and VS Code were more likely (33% and 36%, respectively) to develop on Windows than the self-selected group (16%).
Given the prevalence of Go for cloud development and containerized workloads, it’s no surprise that Go developers primarily deploy to Linux environments (96%).
We included several questions to understand what architectures respondents are deploying to when deploying to Linux, Windows or WebAssembly. The x86-64 / AMD64 architecture was by far the most popular choice for those deploying to both Linux (92%) and Windows (97%). ARM64 was second at 49% for Linux and 21% for Windows.
Not many respondents deployed to Web Assembly (only about 4% of overall respondents), but 73% that do said they deploy to JS and 48% to WASI Preview 1.
We introduced a new question on this survey to assess awareness and usage of popular editors for Go. When interpreting these results, keep in mind that 34% of respondents came to the survey from VS Code and 9% of respondents came from GoLand, so it is more likely for them to use those editors regularly.
VS Code was the most widely used editor, with 66% of respondents using it regularly, and GoLand was the second most used at 35%. Almost all respondents had heard of both VS Code and GoLand, but respondents were much more likely to have at least tried VS Code. Interestingly, 33% of respondents said they regularly use 2 or more editors. They may use different editors for different tasks or environments, such as using Emacs or Vim via SSH, where IDEs aren’t available.
We also asked a question about editor preference, the same as we have asked on previous surveys. Because our randomly sampled populations were recruited from within VS Code or GoLand, they are strongly biased towards preferring those editors. To avoid skewing the results, we show the data for the most preferred editor here from the self-selected group only. 38% preferred VS Code and 35% preferred GoLand. This is a notable difference from the last survey in H1, when 43% preferred VS Code and 33% preferred GoLand. A possible explanation could be in how respondents were recruited this year. This year the VS Code notification began inviting developers to take the survey before the Go blog entry was posted, so a larger proportion of respondents came from the VS Code prompt this year who might have otherwise come from the blog post. Because we only show the self-selected respondents in this chart, data from respondents from the VS Code prompt data are not represe