Go Developer Survey 2023 H2 Results - The Go Programming Language

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Todd Kulesza 5 December 2023
In August 2023, the Go team at Google conducted our bi-annual survey of Go developers. We recruited participants via a public post on the Go blog and a randomized prompt in VS Code, resulting in 4,005 responses. We primarily focused survey questions around a few topics: general sentiment and feedback about developing with Go, technology stacks used alongside Go, how developers start new Go projects, recent experiences with toolchain error messages, and understanding developer interest around ML/AI.
Thank you to everyone who participated in this survey! This report shares what we learned from your feedback.
Go developers continue to report high levels of satisfaction with the Go ecosystem. A large majority of respondents said they felt satisfied while working with Go over the past year (90% satisfied, 6% dissatisfied), and a majority (52%) went further and said they were “very satisfied”, the highest rating. Longtime readers have likely noticed that this number doesn’t change much from year to year. This is expected for a large, stable project like Go; we view this metric as a lagging indicator that can help confirm widespread issues in the Go ecosystem, but isn’t where we expect to first learn about potential problems.
We typically find that the longer someone has worked with Go, the more likely they are to report being satisfied with it. This trend continued in 2023; among respondents with less than one year of Go experience, 82% reported satisfaction with the Go development experience, compared to the 94% of Go developers with five or more years of experience. There are likely a mix of factors contributing to this, such as some respondents developing an appreciation for Go’s design choices over time, or deciding Go isn’t a good fit for their work and so not returning to this survey in following years (i.e., survivorship bias). Still, this data helps us quantify the current getting started experience for Go developers, and it seems clear we could do more to help emerging Gophers find their footing and enjoy early successes developing with Go.
The key takeaway is that a large majority of people who chose to work with Go during the past year were happy with their experience. Further, the number of people working with Go continues to increase; we see evidence of this from external research like Stack Overflow’s Developer Survey (which found 14% of professional developers worked with Go during the past year, a roughly 15% year-over-year increase), as well as analytics for go.dev (which show an 8% rise in visitors year-over-year). Combining this growth with a high satisfaction score is evidence that Go continues to appeal to developers, and suggests that many developers who choose to learn the language feel good about their decision long afterwards. In their own words:
“After 30+ years of development in C, C++, Java, and now seven years of programming in Go, it is still the most productive language by far. It’s not perfect (no language is), but it has the best balance of productivity, complexity, and performance.” — Professional Go developer w/ 5 – 9 years of experience
“This is currently the best language I know, and I’ve tried many. The tooling is awesome, compile times are great, and I can be really productive. I’m glad I have Go as a tool, and I don’t need to use TypeScript server-side. Thanks.” — Open source Go developer w/ 3 – 4 years of experience
As in prior years, the majority of survey respondents told us they work with Go on Linux (63%) and macOS (58%) systems. Small variations in these numbers from year to year are most likely dependent upon who finds and responds to this survey (particularly on the Go blog), as we don’t see consistent year-over-year trends in the random sample coming from VS Code.
We do continue to see that newer members of the Go community are more likely to be working with Windows than more experienced Go developers. We interpret this as a signal that Windows-based development is important for onboarding new developers to the Go ecosystem, and is a topic our team hopes to focus on more in 2024.
Respondents continue to be heavily focused on Linux deployments. Given the prevalence of Go for cloud development and containerized workloads, this is not surprising but is still an important confirmation. We found few meaningful differences based on factors such as organization size or experience level; indeed, while novice Go developers appear more likely to develop on Windows, 92% still deploy to Linux systems. Perhaps the most interesting finding from this breakdown is that more experienced Go developers said they deploy to a wider variety of systems (most notably WebAssembly and IoT), though it’s unclear if this is because such deployments are challenging for newer Go developers or the result of experienced Go developers using Go in a broader range of contexts. We also observed that both IoT and WebAssembly have steadily increased in recent years, with each rising from 3% in 2021 to 6% and 5% in 2023, respectively.
The computing architecture landscape has changed over the past few years, and we see that reflected in the current architectures Go developers say they work with. While x86-compatible systems still account for the majority of development (89%), ARM64 is also now used by a majority of respondents (56%). This adoption appears to be partly driven by Apple Silicon; macOS developers are now more l