The Go Blog

Go 2017 Survey Results

26 February 2018

Thank you

This post summarizes the result of our 2017 user survey along with commentary and insights. It also draws key comparisons between the results of the 2016 and 2017 survey.

This year we had 6,173 survey respondents, 70% more than the 3,595 we had in the Go 2016 User Survey. In addition, it also had a slightly higher completion rate (84% → 87%) and a higher response rate to most of the questions. We believe that survey length is the main cause of this improvement as the 2017 survey was shortened in response to feedback that the 2016 survey was too long.

We are grateful to everyone who provided their feedback through the survey to help shape the future of Go.

Programming background

For the first time, more survey respondents say they are paid to write Go than say they write it outside work. This indicates a significant shift in Go's user base and in its acceptance by companies for professional software development.

The areas people who responded to the survey work in is mostly consistent with last year, however, mobile and desktop applications have fallen significantly.

Another important shift: the #1 use of Go is now writing API/RPC services (65%, up 5% over 2016), taking over the top spot from writing CLI tools in Go (63%). Both take full advantage of Go's distinguishing features and are key elements of modern cloud computing. As more companies adopt Go, we expect these two uses of Go to continue to thrive.

Most of the metrics reaffirm things we have learned in prior years. Go programmers still overwhelmingly prefer Go. As more time passes Go users are deepening their experience in Go. While Go has increased its lead among Go developers, the order of language rankings remains quite consistent with last year.

The following apply to me: (multiple choice) 4,201 (67%) I program at work in Go 3,935 (63%) I program in Go outside of work 3,381 (54%) I program at work in another language 1,001 (16%) I manage a programming team 506  (8%) I am a student 113  (2%) Other 27  (0%) No response

I've used Go for: (single choice) 686 (11%) Less than 3 months 1,588 (26%) 3 - 12 months 1,338 (21%) 13 - 24 months 1,678 (27%) 2 - 4 years 809 (13%) 4+ years 102  (2%) I've never used Go 25  (0%) No response

I work in the following areas: (multiple choice) 3,807 (61%) Web development 2,319 (37%) Systems programming 2,250 (36%) DevOps 1,969 (32%) Network programming 1,751 (28%) Databases 848 (14%) Security 777 (12%) Finance/Commerce 724 (12%) Data Science 696 (11%) Mobile 694 (11%) Desktop/GUI applications 647 (10%) Embedded devices/Internet of Things 581  (9%) Academic/Scientific/Numeric 581  (9%) Machine Learning/Artificial Intelligence 334  (5%) Gaming 381  (6%) Other 111  (2%) No response

I write the following in Go: (multiple choice) 4,071 (65%) API/RPC services (returning non-HTML) 3,921 (63%) A runnable/interactive program (CLI) 3,027 (49%) Web services (returning HTML) 2,766 (44%) Agents and daemons (e.g, monitoring) 2,394 (38%) Libraries or Frameworks 2,038 (33%) Automation/scripts (e.g, deployment, configuration management) 2,030 (33%) Data processing (pipeline, aggregation) 167  (3%) I don't write in Go 176  (3%) Other 70  (1%) No response

I write in Go: (single choice) 3,019 (48%) As part of my daily routine 1,802 (29%) Weekly 557  (9%) Monthly 679 (11%) Infrequently 118  (2%) I've never written in Go 51  (1%) No response

Rank the following languages in terms of your expertise 5,540 (30, 27, 17, 9, 6%) Go 3,638 (9, 16, 15, 11, 7%) JavaScript 3,369 (13, 12, 12, 10, 7%) Python 2,706 (11, 8, 8, 9, 7%) Java 2,402 (7, 8, 8, 8, 8%) C 2,020 (2, 5, 9, 10, 7%) Bash 1,631 (4, 4, 5, 7, 6%) C++ 1,475 (7, 5, 4, 4, 4%) PHP 1,042 (4, 3, 4, 3, 3%) C# 1,034 (4, 3, 3, 3, 3%) Ruby 460 (1, 1, 1, 2, 2%) Perl 284 (0.5, 0.6, 0.8, 1, 1%) Scala 278 (0.2, 0.4, 0.8, 1, 2%) Rust 260 (0.3, 0.5, 0.7, 1, 1%) Swift 223 (0.1, 0.2, 0.8, 1, 1%) Lua 185 (0.1, 0.5, 0.7, 0.8, 0.8%) Kotlin 139 (0.1, 0.2, 0.3, 0.6, 1%) Haskell 139 (0.2, 0.2, 0.4, 0.8, 0.6%) Clojure 136 (0.2, 0.3, 0.4, 0.5, 0.8%) R 124 (0.1, 0.2, 0.4, 0.6, 0.7%) Erlang 24 (0.0, 0.1, 0.0, 0.1, 0.1%) Julia 726 (3, 2, 3, 2, 2%) Other 173 (2.8%) No response

Rank the following languages in terms of your preference 5,728 (65, 18, 6, 2, 1%) Go 3,156 (7, 18, 12, 8, 4%) Python 2,463 (3, 9, 12, 8, 7%) JavaScript 1,827 (2, 7, 8, 7, 6%) C 1,764 (2, 6, 7, 7, 6%) Java 1,240 (1, 4, 5, 5, 5%) C++ 1,196 (0.6, 3, 6, 5, 5%) Bash 939 (2, 4, 4, 3, 2%) Rust 924 (2, 4, 4, 3, 2%) C# 859 (2, 4, 3, 3, 2%) Ruby 757 (0.8, 3, 3, 3, 3%) PHP 455 (1, 2, 2, 2, 0.9%) Kotlin 414 (0.7, 1, 2, 2, 1%) Swift 383 (1, 1, 1, 2, 1%) Haskell 335 (0.8, 1, 1, 1, 0.9%) Scala 305 (0.6, 1, 1, 1, 0.9%) Perl 279 (0.3, 0.8, 1, 1, 0.8%) Erlang 250 (0.1, 0.5, 1, 1, 1%) Lua 248 (0.6, 0.8, 1, 0.9, 0.6%) Clojure 113 (0.1, 0.4, 0.4, 0.5, 0.4%) R 71 (0.1, 0.2, 0.3, 0.3, 0.2%) Julia 709 (2, 3, 3, 2, 1%) Other 241 (3.9%) No response

20162017The following apply to me: (multiple choice)4,201 (67%)I program at work in Go3,935 (63%)I program in Go outside of work3,381 (54%)I program at work in another language1,001 (16%)I manage a programming team506  (8%)I am a student113  (2%)Other27  (0%)No responseThe following apply to me: (multiple choice)2,386 (66%)I program in Go outside of work2,235 (62%)I program at work in Go2,004 (56%)I program at work in another language618 (17%)I manage a programming team337  (9%)I am a student78  (2%)Other10  (0%)No response

20162017I work in the following areas: (multiple choice)2,272 (63%)Web development1,359 (38%)Systems programming1,251 (35%)DevOps1,169 (33%)Network programming1,006 (28%)Databases533 (15%)Mobile490 (14%)Desktop/GUI applications457 (13%)Security435 (12%)Data Science417 (12%)Finance/Commerce394 (11%)Embedded devices/Internet of Things379 (11%)Academic/Scientific/Numeric228  (6%)Gaming238  (7%)Other74  (2%)No responseI work in the following areas: (multiple choice)3,807 (61%)Web development2,319 (37%)Systems programming2,250 (36%)DevOps1,969 (32%)Network programming1,751 (28%)Databases848 (14%)Security777 (12%)Finance/Commerce724 (12%)Data Science696 (11%)Mobile694 (11%)Desktop/GUI applications647 (10%)Embedded devices/Internet of Things581  (9%)Academic/Scientific/Numeric581  (9%)Machine Learning/Artificial Intelligence334  (5%)Gaming381  (6%)Other111  (2%)No response

20162017I write the following in Go: (multiple choice)2,247 (63%)A runnable/interactive program2,174 (60%)API/RPC services1,886 (52%)Web services1,583 (44%)Agents and daemons1,417 (39%)Libraries or Frameworks1,209 (34%)Data processing1,120 (31%)Automation/scripts107  (3%)I don't write in Go137  (4%)Other45  (1%)No responseI write the following in Go: (multiple choice)4,071 (65%)API/RPC services3,921 (63%)A runnable/interactive program3,027 (49%)Web services2,766 (44%)Agents and daemons2,394 (38%)Libraries or Frameworks2,038 (33%)Automation/scripts2,030 (33%)Data processing167  (3%)I don't write in Go176  (3%)Other70  (1%)No response

Go usage

In nearly every question around the usage and perception of Go, Go has demonstrated improvement over our prior survey. Users are happier using Go, and a greater percentage prefer using Go for their next project.

When asked about the biggest challenges to their own personal use of Go, users clearly conveyed that lack of dependency management and lack of generics were their two biggest issues, consistent with 2016. In 2017 we laid a foundation to be able to address these issues. We improved our proposal and development process with the addition of Experience Reports which is enabling the project to gather and obtain feedback critical to making these significant changes. We also made sigificant changes under the hood in how Go obtains, and builds packages. This is foundational work essential to addressing our dependency management needs.

These two issues will continue to be a major focus of the project through 2018.

In this section we asked two new questions. Both center around what developers are doing with Go in a more granular way than we've previously asked. We hope this data will provide insights for the Go project and ecosystem.

Since last year there has been an increase of the percentage of people who identified "Go lacks critical features" as the reason they don't use Go more and a decreased percentage who identified "Go not being an appropriate fit". Other than these changes, the list remains consistent with last year.

To what extent do you agree or disagree with the following statements: (strongly disagree, disagree, somewhat disagree, neither agree nor disagree, somewhat agree, agree, strongly agree) 5,938 (2, 0.8, 1, 2, 5, 21, 64%) I would recommend using Go to others (26:1) [32:1] 5,928 (2, 1, 2, 4, 8, 20, 58%) I would prefer to use Go for my next new project (17:1) [23:1] 4,548 (1, 0.8, 1, 7, 9, 23, 31%) Go is working well for my team (21:1) [26:1] 4,716 (5, 6, 4, 17, 14, 14, 17%) Go is critical to my company’s success (3.1:1) [3.1:1]

Reading the data: This question asked how strongly the respondent agreed or disagreed with the statement. The responses for each statement are displayed as sections of a single bar, from “strongly disagree” in deep red on the left end to “strongly agree” in deep blue on the right end. The bars use the same scale as the rest of the graphs, so they can (and do, especially later in the survey) vary in overall length due to lack of responses.

The ratio after the text compares the number of respondents who agreed (including “somewhat agree” and “strongly agree”) to those who disagreed (including “somewhat disagree” and “strongly disagree”). For example, the ratio of respondents agreeing that they would recommend Go to respondents disagreeing was 19 to 1. The second ratio (within the brackets) is simply a weighted ratio with each somewhat = 1, agree/disagree = 2, and strongly = 4.

What is the biggest challenge you personally face using Go today? 582 (9.3%) lack 489 (7.9%) generics 402 (6.5%) management 277 (4.4%) libraries 266 (4.3%) dependency management 194 (3.1%) lack of generics 159 (2.6%) package 137 (2.2%) gui 137 (2.2%) library 132 (2.1%) good 132 (2.1%) work 122 (2.0%) time 115 (1.8%) enough 114 (1.8%) error handling 113 (1.8%) type 109 (1.8%) learning 106 (1.7%) projects 104 (1.7%) hard 97 (1.6%) team 91 (1.5%) dependencies 91 (1.5%) java 87 (1.4%) c 82 (1.3%) debugging 81 (1.3%) no generics 81 (1.3%) vendoring 79 (1.3%) package management 79 (1.3%) programming 77 (1.2%) gopath 76 (1.2%) features 76 (1.2%) types 75 (1.2%) people 74 (1.2%) web 73 (1.2%) python 73 (1.2%) write 68 (1.1%) development 67 (1.1%) generic 67 (1.1%) writing 66 (1.1%) difficult 64 (1.0%) interface 64 (1.0%) tools 63 (1.0%) missing 62 (1.0%) performance 60 (1.0%) interfaces 60 (1.0%) standard 58 (0.9%) community 58 (0.9%) packages 56 (0.9%) build 56 (0.9%) well 55 (0.9%) best 55 (0.9%) cgo 55 (0.9%) debugger 55 (0.9%) ide 55 (0.9%) other languages 55 (0.9%) verbose 54 (0.9%) boilerplate 54 (0.9%) finding 54 (0.9%) learn 53 (0.9%) not enough 2,956 (47.5%) No response

Reading the data: This question asked for write-in responses. The bars above show the fraction of surveys mentioning common words or phrases. Only words or phrases that appeared in 20 or more surveys are listed, and meaningless common words or phrases like “the” or “to be” are omitted. The displayed results do overlap: for example, the 402 responses that mentioned “management” do include the 266 listed separately that mentioned “dependency management” and the 79 listed separately that mentioned “package management.” However, nearly or completely redundant shorter entries are omitted: there are not twenty or more surveys that listed “dependency” without mentioning “dependency management,” so there is no separate entry for “dependency.”

If it were not for the following reasons I would use Go more: 3,077 (31, 14, 4%) I work on an existing project written in another language 2,152 (14, 16, 5%) My project / team / TL prefers another language 1,218 (10, 5, 4%) Go lacks critical features 1,100 (6, 7, 4%) Go lacks critical libraries 1,056 (6, 6, 4%) Go isn't appropriate for what I'm working on 643 (4, 4, 3%) Not enough education or support resources for Go 311 (2, 2, 1%) Go lacks critical performance 790 (5, 4, 3%) Other 1,309 (21%) No response

Which of the following functionality have you implemented (multiple choice) 3,262 (52%) Writing logs/metrics 3,123 (50%) Reading/updating configuration 2,771 (45%) User login and authentication 2,748 (44%) Process to process communication 2,504 (40%) Service authentication/authorization 2,056 (33%) Health checking 1,138 (18%) Keys & secret maintenance 831 (13%) Distributed caching 532  (9%) Distributed tracing 1,269 (20%) No response

Which of the following do you access from Go: (multiple choice) 3,784 (61%) Open Source Relational DB (MySQL/PostgreSQL/CockroachDB) 2,400 (39%) Memory Cache (Redis/memcache) 2,005 (32%) Cloud Storage (S3/Google Cloud Storage/Azure Storage/Minio) 1,891 (30%) Open Source NoSQL DB (MongoDB/Cassandra) 1,606 (26%) Authentication and federation (SSO/LDAP/OAuth) 1,546 (25%) Distributed Key-Value store (etcd/consul) 657 (11%) Proprietary Relational DB (Oracle/DB2/MSSQL/Sybase) 459  (7%) Distributed Lock Service (zookeeper) 1,367 (22%) No response

20162017If it were not for the following reasons I would use Go more:3,077 (31,14,4%)I work on an existing project written in another lang2,152 (14,16,5%)My project / team / TL prefers another language1,218 (10,5,4%)Go lacks critical features1,100 (6,7,4%)Go lacks critical libraries1,056 (6,6,4%)Go isn't appropriate for what I'm working on643 (4,4,3%)Not enough education or support resources for Go311 (2,2,1%)Go lacks critical performance790 (5,4,3%)Other1,309 (21%)No responseIf it were not for the following reasons I would use Go more:1,485 (24,14,4%)I work on an existing project written in another lang1,160 (16,12,4%)My project / team / TL prefers another language841 (11,8,5%)Go isn’t an appropriate fit for what I’m working on596 (6,6,4%)Go lacks critical libraries412 (6,3,2%)Go lacks critical features319 (3,3,3%)Not enough education or support resources for Go121 (1,1,0.8%)Go lacks critical performance374 (4,3,3%)Other1,042 (29%)No response

Development and deployment

We asked programmers which operating systems they develop Go on; the ratios of their responses remain consistent with last year. 64% of respondents say they use Linux, 49% use MacOS, and 18% use Windows, with multiple choices allowed.

Continuing its explosive growth, VSCode is now the most popular editor among Gophers. IntelliJ/GoLand also saw significant increase in usage. These largely came at the expense of Atom and Submlime Text which saw relative usage drops. This question had a 6% higher response rate from last year.

Survey respondents demonstrated significantly higher satisfaction with Go support in their editors over 2016 with the ratio of satisfied to dissatisfied doubling (9:1 → 18:1). Thank you to everyone who worked on Go editor support for all your hard work.

Go deployment is roughly evenly split between privately managed servers and hosted cloud servers. For Go applications, Google Cloud services saw significant increase over 2016. For Non-Go applications, AWS Lambda saw the largest increase in use.

I primarily develop Go on: (multiple choice) 3,973 (64%) Linux 3,048 (49%) MacOS 1,151 (18%) Windows 112  (2%) Other 328  (5%) No response

My preferred code editor 2,449 (27, 13%) VSCode 2,288 (22, 14%) Vim 1,628 (19, 7%) IntelliJ/GoLand 912 (7, 8%) Sublime Text 791 (6, 7%) Atom 490 (6, 2%) Emacs 274 (2, 2%) Visual Studio 154 (1, 1%) LiteIDE 88 (0.5, 0.9%) Eclipse 67 (0.6, 0.4%) Acme 256 (3, 2%) Other 382 (6.1%) No response

How satisfied are you with Go support in your preferred editor: (very dissatisfied, dissatisfied, somewhat dissatisfied, neither satisfied or unsatisfied, somewhat satisfied, satisfied, very satisfied) 5,730 (1, 0.9, 3, 3, 16, 38, 29%) (18:1) [24:1]

My team deploys Go programs to: (multiple choice) 2,664 (43%) Self/Company Owned Servers 1,689 (27%) AWS EC2 799 (13%) None 732 (12%) AWS Container 631 (10%) Digital Ocean 596 (10%) Google Compute Engine 485  (8%) Google Container Engine (GKE) 328  (5%) Google App Engine 262  (4%) AWS Lambda 255  (4%) Heroku 255  (4%) Microsoft Azure 183  (3%) Linode 61  (1%) Azure Container Service 51  (1%) Google Cloud Functions 13  (0%) Azure Functions 601 (10%) Other 652 (10%) No response

My team deploys Non-Go programs to: (multiple choice) 2,865 (46%) Self/Company Owned Servers 2,076 (33%) AWS EC2 806 (13%) AWS Container 644 (10%) AWS Lambda 528  (8%) Google Compute Engine 527  (8%) Digital Ocean 442  (7%) None 402  (6%) Microsoft Azure 340  (5%) Heroku 327  (5%) Google Container Engine (GKE) 188  (3%) Google App Engine 159  (3%) Linode 95  (2%) Google Cloud Functions 85  (1%) Azure Container Service 50  (1%) Azure Functions 524  (8%) Other 825 (13%) No response

20162017My preferred code editor2,449 (27,13%)VSCode2,288 (22,14%)Vim1,628 (19,7%)IntelliJ/GoLand912 (7,8%)Sublime Text791 (6,7%)Atom490 (6,2%)Emacs274 (2,2%)Visual Studio154 (1,1%)LiteIDE88 (0.5,0.9%)Eclipse67 (0.6,0.4%)Acme256 (3,2%)Other382 (6.1%)No responseMy preferred code editor1,359 (25,13%)Vim814 (14,9%)VSCode676 (10,9%)Atom687 (13,6%)IntelliJ655 (10,8%)Sublime Text305 (6,2%)Emacs137 (2,2%)Visual Studio153 (3,2%)LiteIDE99 (1,2%)Eclipse37 (0.5,0.5%)Acme238 (4,3%)Other425 (12%)No response

20162017My team deploys Go programs to: (multiple choice)1,489 (41%)Self/Company Owned Servers928 (26%)AWS EC2503 (14%)None412 (11%)Digital Ocean292  (8%)AWS Container221  (6%)Google Compute Engine188  (5%)Google App Engine161  (4%)Google Container Engine (GKE)121  (3%)Heroku114  (3%)Microsoft Azure104  (3%)Linode94  (3%)AWS Lambda301  (8%)Other639 (18%)No responseMy team deploys Go programs to: (multiple choice)2,664 (43%)Self/Company Owned Servers1,689 (27%)AWS EC2799 (13%)None732 (12%)AWS Container631 (10%)Digital Ocean596 (10%)Google Compute Engine485  (8%)Google Container Engine (GKE)328  (5%)Google App Engine262  (4%)AWS Lambda255  (4%)Heroku255  (4%)Microsoft Azure183  (3%)Linode61  (1%)Azure Container Service51  (1%)Google Cloud Functions13  (0%)Azure Functions601 (10%)Other652 (10%)No response

20162017My team deploys Non-Go programs to: (multiple choice)1,714 (48%)Self/Company Owned Servers1,122 (31%)AWS EC2360 (10%)Digital Ocean343 (10%)AWS Container249  (7%)None233  (6%)AWS Lambda210  (6%)Microsoft Azure186  (5%)Google Compute Engine185  (5%)Heroku115  (3%)Google Container Engine (GKE)100  (3%)Linode94  (3%)Google App Engine297  (8%)Other660 (18%)No responseMy team deploys Non-Go programs to: (multiple choice)2,865 (46%)Self/Company Owned Servers2,076 (33%)AWS EC2806 (13%)AWS Container644 (10%)AWS Lambda528  (8%)Google Compute Engine527  (8%)Digital Ocean442  (7%)None402  (6%)Microsoft Azure340  (5%)Heroku327  (5%)Google Container Engine (GKE)188  (3%)Google App Engine159  (3%)Linode95  (2%)Google Cloud Functions85  (1%)Azure Container Service50  (1%)Azure Functions524  (8%)Other825 (13%)No response

Working Effectively

We asked how strongly people agreed or disagreed with various statements about Go. All questions are repeated from last year with the addition of one new question which we introduced to add further clarifaction around how users are able to both find and use Go libraries.

All responses either indicated a small improvement or are comparable to 2016.

As in 2016, the most commonly requested missing library for Go is one for writing GUIs though the demand is not as pronounced as last year. No other missing library registered a significant number of responses.

The primary sources for finding answers to Go questions are the Go web site, Stack Overflow, and reading source code directly. Stack Overflow showed a small increase from usage over last year.

The primary sources for Go news are still the Go blog, Reddit’s /r/golang and Twitter; like last year, there may be some bias here since these are also how the survey was announced.

To what extent do you agree or disagree with the following statements: (strongly disagree, disagree, somewhat disagree, neither agree nor disagree, somewhat agree, agree, strongly agree) 5,555 (1, 2, 4, 7, 27, 34, 13%) I have a good understanding of Go best practices (9.5:1) [11:1] 5,549 (0.4, 0.9, 3, 4, 17, 42, 23%) I am able to quickly find answers to my questions (21:1) [31:1] 5,528 (0.4, 0.4, 1, 2, 6, 32, 47%) Go's performance meets my needs (48:1) [80:1] 4,614 (1, 2, 4, 12, 15, 26, 13%) Go's support for language interoperability meets my needs (6.8:1) [8.8:1] 5,478 (0.8, 2, 5, 6, 24, 36, 13%) I am able to quickly find libraries that I need (8.9:1) [12:1] 5,443 (0.9, 2, 5, 7, 23, 37, 12%) The Go libraries I use have the stability and features I need (9.1:1) [12:1] 5,521 (0.8, 2, 4, 5, 17, 37, 22%) Go language, library, and tool documentation meet my needs (11:1) [16:1]

To what extent do you agree or disagree with the following statements: (strongly disagree, disagree, somewhat disagree, neither agree nor disagree, somewhat agree, agree, strongly agree) 5,446 (0.8, 2, 6, 6, 21, 37, 14%) I am able to effectively diagnose bugs in my Go programs (8.7:1) [12:1] 4,968 (0.7, 2, 6, 13, 22, 27, 9%) I am able to effectively diagnose performance issues in Go programs (6.7:1) [8.7:1] 5,319 (0.7, 2, 3, 6, 16, 35, 24%) I am able to effectively use Go’s concurrency features (goroutines, channels, select) (14:1) [21:1] 5,096 (2, 5, 8, 15, 24, 21, 7%) I am able to effectively debug uses of Go’s concurrency features (goroutines, channels, select) (3.6:1) [3.9:1]

Which Go libraries do you need that aren’t available today? 306 (4.9%) gui 221 (3.5%) library 185 (3.0%) libraries 90 (1.4%) native 83 (1.3%) good 60 (1.0%) ui 59 (0.9%) machine learning 54 (0.9%) framework 48 (0.8%) gui library 48 (0.8%) orm 48 (0.8%) processing 47 (0.8%) desktop 44 (0.7%) web 41 (0.7%) cross-platform 39 (0.6%) client 39 (0.6%) platform 37 (0.6%) standard 35 (0.6%) audio 34 (0.5%) image 34 (0.5%) mobile 33 (0.5%) sql 32 (0.5%) soap 31 (0.5%) pdf 30 (0.5%) api 30 (0.5%) package 4,578 (73.5%) No response

Rank the following in terms of where you get Go answers from: 4,337 (28, 20, 13, 6, 2%) Stack Overflow 3,791 (29, 17, 9, 4, 1%) golang.org 3,362 (13, 17, 14, 8, 2%) Reading source code (e.g., standard library, open-source packages) 2,428 (4, 11, 13, 8, 3%) GitHub 1,408 (5, 6, 6, 5, 2%) Coworkers 1,071 (2, 4, 5, 4, 2%) golang-nuts mailing list (groups.google.com/d/forum/golang-nuts) 895 (1, 2, 4, 4, 3%) Reddit (r/golang) 569 (1, 2, 2, 2, 2%) Gopher Slack (invite.slack.golangbridge.org) 432 (0.9, 1, 2, 2, 2%) Friends 283 (0.5, 0.7, 0.9, 1, 1%) Twitter 214 (0.2, 0.8, 0.8, 1, 0.6%) Go Forum (forum.golangbridge.org) 186 (0.5, 0.7, 0.7, 0.6, 0.5%) IRC 386 (2, 1, 1, 0.9, 0.7%) Other 844 (14%) No response

Rank the following in terms of where you get Go news from: 2,809 (16, 14, 9, 4, 2%) blog.Golang.org 1,838 (15, 7, 4, 3, 1%) Twitter 1,703 (12, 7, 4, 2, 1%) Reddit (r/golang) 1,617 (13, 7, 3, 2, 0.7%) Golangweekly.com 1,578 (9, 8, 5, 3, 1%) Hacker News 1,051 (2, 5, 5, 3, 2%) Community Blogs 859 (2, 4, 4, 2, 2%) GitHub 798 (4, 4, 3, 1, 0.6%) Coworkers 704 (1, 3, 3, 2, 1%) Just For Func 516 (2, 2, 2, 1, 0.7%) golang-nuts mailing list (groups.google.com/d/forum/golang-nuts) 428 (1, 2, 2, 1, 0.6%) Go Time podcast 393 (2, 2, 1, 1, 0.4%) Golangnews.com 333 (1, 1, 1, 1, 0.7%) Gopher Slack (invite.slack.golangbridge.org) 287 (1, 1, 1, 0.7, 0.4%) golang-announce (groups.google.com/d/forum/golang-announce) 120 (0.5, 0.5, 0.4, 0.2, 0.3%) Facebook 86 (0.1, 0.4, 0.4, 0.2, 0.2%) Go Forum (forum.golangbridge.org) 205 (1, 1, 0.7, 0.3, 0.1%) Other 1,040 (17%) No response

I have attended: (multiple choice) 2,497 (40%) None 1,618 (26%) A Go meetup 947 (15%) A Go themed conference (GopherCon, GothamGo, etc) 506  (8%) A Go remote meetup / online event 363  (6%) Go training 228  (4%) A technical conference for it's Go content 65  (1%) A Women Who Go event 64  (1%) A GoBridge event 58  (1%) Other 1,440 (23%) No response

The Go Project

59% of respondents expressed interest in contributing in some way to the Go community and projects, up from 55% last year. Respondents also indicated that they felt much more welcome to contribute than in 2016. Unfortunately, respondents indicated only a very tiny improvement in understanding how to contribute. We will be actively working with the community and its leaders to make this a more accessible process.

Respondents showed an increase in agreement that they are confident in the leadership of the Go project (9:1 → 11:1). They also showed a small increase in agreement that the project leadership understands their needs (2.6:1 → 2.8:1) and in agreement that they feel comfortable approaching project leadership with questions and feedback (2.2:1 → 2.4:1). While improvements were made, this continues to be an area of focus for the project and its leadership going forward. We will continue to work to improve our understanding of user needs and approachability.

We tried some new ways to engage with users in 2017 and while progress was made, we are still working on making these solutions scalable for our growing community.

I contribute to open source projects written in Go: (single choice) 382 (6.1%) As part of my daily routine 463 (7.4%) Weekly 603 (9.7%) Monthly 2,180 (35.0%) Infrequently 1,792 (28.8%) Never 806 (12.9%) No response

I have or am interested in contributing in the following ways to the Go community and projects: (multiple choice) 1,785 (29%) Standard library 1,331 (21%) Tools (go guru, go vet, go doc, etc) 1,129 (18%) Documentation 1,115 (18%) Tutorials 967 (16%) Community support via Stack Overflow, Slack, mailing list, etc 863 (14%) Being a technical mentor 829 (13%) Community involvement (workgroups, meetup attendance) 727 (12%) Toolchain (compiler, linker, etc) 514  (8%) Go Project maintenance (issue triage) 474  (8%) Event planning (meetup, conference, etc) 433  (7%) Language translation 337  (5%) General UX & Design contributions 309  (5%) golang.org website (code, UX, IA, content, etc) 148  (2%) Other 2,553 (41%) No response

To what extent do you agree or disagree with the following statements: (strongly disagree, disagree, somewhat disagree, neither agree nor disagree, somewhat agree, agree, strongly agree) 4,091 (1, 3, 4, 19, 12, 18, 8%) I feel welcome to contribute to Go (compiler, standard library, documentation, website) (4.3:1) [5.0:1] 4,083 (3, 8, 10, 17, 11, 11, 5%) The process of contributing to the Go project is clear to me (1.3:1) [1.3:1] 3,657 (2, 3, 5, 23, 10, 13, 4%) The Go project leadership understands my needs (2.8:1) [2.8:1] 3,860 (2, 5, 6, 20, 10, 14, 6%) I feel comfortable approaching the Go project leadership with questions and feedback (2.4:1) [2.7:1] 4,351 (1, 2, 2, 12, 10, 26, 18%) I am confident in the leadership of Go (11:1) [13:1]

Community

At the end of the survey, we asked some demographic questions.

The country distribution of responses is largely similar to last year with minor fluctuations. Like last year, the distribution of countries is similar to the visits to golang.org, though some Asian countries remain under-represented in the survey.

Perhaps the most significant improvement over 2016 came from the question which asked to what degree do respondents agreed with the statement, "I feel welcome in the Go community". Last year the agreement to disagreement ratio was 15:1. In 2017 this ratio nearly doubled to 25:1.

An important part of a community is making everyone feel welcome, especially people from under-represented demographics. We asked an optional question about identification across a few underrepresented groups. We had a 4% increase in response rate over last year. The percentage of each underrepresented group increased over 2016, some quite significantly.

Like last year, we took the results of the statement “I feel welcome in the Go community” and broke them down by responses to the various underrepresented categories. Like the whole, most of the respondents who identified as underrepresented also felt significantly more welcome in the Go community than in 2016. Respondents who identified as a woman showed the most significant improvement with an increase of over 400% in the ratio of agree:disagree to this statement (3:1 → 13:1). People who identified as ethnically or racially underrepresented had an increase of over 250% (7:1 → 18:1). Like last year, those who identified as not underrepresented still had a much higher percentage of agreement to this statement than those identifying from underrepresented groups.

We are encouraged by this progress and hope that the momentum continues.

The final question on the survey was just for fun: what’s your favorite Go keyword? Perhaps unsurprisingly, the most popular response was go, followed by defer, func, interface, and select, unchanged from last year.

Did you take last year's survey (single choice) 1,569 (25%) Yes 2,892 (46%) No 952 (15%) I don't remember 813 (13%) No response

To what extent do you agree or disagree with the following statement: (strongly disagree, disagree, somewhat disagree, neither agree nor disagree, somewhat agree, agree, strongly agree) 4,970 (0.5, 0.8, 1, 10, 10, 34, 22%) I feel welcome in the Go community (25:1) [33:1]

List of Countries (multiple choice) 1,561 (25%) United States of America 436  (7%) Germany 343  (6%) United Kingdom 211  (3%) Canada 200  (3%) France 174  (3%) Russia 130  (2%) Australia 113  (2%) India 110  (2%) Sweden 103  (2%) China 99  (2%) Netherlands 95  (2%) Spain 94  (2%) Brazil 89  (1%) Japan 84  (1%) Poland 62  (1%) Ukraine 58  (1%) Italy 57  (1%) Switzerland 48  (1%) Taiwan 42  (1%) Israel 873 (14%) Other 1,244 (20%) No response

We want the Go community to be inclusive; we want to see how we're doing and how to improve. Plea... (multiple choice) 2,591 (42%) I do not identify as part of an underrepresented group 790 (13%) I prefer not to answer 197  (3%) I identify as LGBTQIA 191  (3%) I identify as ethnically or racially underrepresented 164  (3%) I identify as neurodiverse or as having a disability 156  (3%) I identify with an underrepresented group not listed (please specify) 101  (2%) I identify as a woman 81  (1%) I identify as part of an underrepresented group, but I prefer not to specify 2,085 (33%) No response

Just for fun: What is your favorite Go keyword? (multiple choice) 1,627 (26%) go 856 (14%) defer 539  (9%) func 384  (6%) select 375  (6%) interface 242  (4%) range 222  (4%) chan 215  (3%) struct 114  (2%) fallthrough 96  (2%) goto 90  (1%) switch 89  (1%) type 82  (1%) for 71  (1%) map 48  (1%) import 39  (1%) if 33  (1%) package 32  (1%) return 27  (0%) var 24  (0%) continue 22  (0%) const 15  (0%) break 10  (0%) case 5  (0%) else 969 (16%) No response

Is there anything else you would like to share with us? 130 (2.1%) great 119 (1.9%) generics 104 (1.7%) love 104 (1.7%) thank you 99 (1.6%) thanks 87 (1.4%) community 58 (0.9%) programming 56 (0.9%) simple 52 (0.8%) awesome 51 (0.8%) i love 48 (0.8%) people 44 (0.7%) team 40 (0.6%) golang 38 (0.6%) keep up the good work 38 (0.6%) time 37 (0.6%) hard 37 (0.6%) languages 36 (0.6%) job 35 (0.6%) features 35 (0.6%) great work 30 (0.5%) 3 30 (0.5%) amazing 30 (0.5%) c 30 (0.5%) google 5,167 (83.0%) No response

Finally, on behalf of the entire Go project, we are grateful for everyone who has contributed to our project, whether by being a part of our great community, by taking this survey or by taking an interest in Go.

By Steve Francia

Go 1.10 is released

16 February 2018

Happy Friday, happy weekend! Today the Go team is happy to announce the release of Go 1.10. You can get it from the download page.

See the Go 1.10 release notes for all the details.

The most exciting part of this release for many people will probably be that the go tool now does automatic caching of build & test results. Of course, one of the hundreds of smaller changes may be your favorite.

To celebrate the release, Go User Groups around the world are holding release parties. See if there's one in your area, or feel free to organize one!

Thanks to everyone who contributed to this release and everyone who helped test the Go 1.10 betas and release candidates to ensure a perfect, bug-free final release. However, if you do notice any bugs or unexpected changes not noted in the release notes, be sure to file a bug.

Enjoy the weekend, and enjoy the new release!

P.S. Many of this year's Go conferences are accepting talk proposals this month. We always love to see new speakers and encourage you to think about proposing a talk. For more information, see golang.org/wiki/NewSpeakers.

By Brad Fitzpatrick

Hello, 中国!

22 January 2018

We are thrilled to announce that the content on golang.org is now available in mainland China through the name https://golang.google.cn. The growing Go developer community in China can now directly access official documentation, technical articles, and binaries.

The Go community in China is bigger than ever. In 2015, Robert Griesemer visited Shanghai to attend GopherChina, the first Go conference in the country. In the years since, it has become one of the largest Go conferences in the world with over 1200 attendees at their 2017 event. Over the same period, one of the most popular community-built Go forums saw their traffic increase threefold and the number of participants in Go-specific groups on social platforms like WeChat and QQ has grown to over 11,000 people.

Go adoption within China-based companies has also increased, with Qiniu, Huawei, Alibaba, and countless others using Go heavily in their production stacks.

We’re excited to provide even more resources for Go developers in China to supplement the excellent material already available to them, but this is just the beginning. We’ll be focusing on making Go more accessible to non-English speakers in 2018, so keep watching this space.

By Andrew Bonventre

Participate in the 2017 Go User Survey

16 November 2017

The Go project wants to hear from you (again)!

Last year we conducted the first ever Go user survey. Thanks to all of you, it was an overwhelming success with over 3500 responses. The survey provided key insights and helped us better plan and prioritize.

We invite you to participate in the 2017 Go User Survey.

The Go User Survey

Who: If you currently use Go, have used Go in the past, or have any interest in the language, please help by sharing your feedback to improve Go for you and your fellow Gophers.

Where: Please take this 15-minute survey by Friday December 8th: 2017 Go User Survey

The survey is anonymous and confidential.

Why: The Go project leadership depends on your feedback to guide the future of the Go project. Your responses will help to understand what's going well and what's not, as well as help us prioritize improvements for the Go language, libraries and tools.

A few weeks after the survey closes, we will publish the anonymous aggregate results to the Go blog. See the 2016 Go user survey results to learn what insights were gained from last year's survey.

Spread the word!

Please help us spread the word by sharing this post on your social network feeds, at meetups, around your office and in other communities.

By Steve Francia

Eight years of Go

10 November 2017

Today we celebrate 8 years since Go was released as an open source project. During Go’s 4th anniversary, Andrew finished the post with “Here's to four more years!”. Now that we have reached that milestone, I cannot help but reflect on how much the project and ecosystem has grown since then. In our post 4 years ago we included a chart demonstrating Go's rising popularity on Google Trends with the search term "golang". Today, we’re including an updated chart. In this relative scale of popularity, what was 100 four years ago is now a mere 17. Go’s popularity has increased exponentially over the last 8 years and continues to grow.

Source: trends.google.com

Developers love Go

Go has been embraced by developers all over the world with approximately one million users worldwide. In the freshly published 2017 Octoverse by GitHub, Go has become the #9 most popular language, surpassing C. Go is the fastest growing language on GitHub in 2017 in the top 10 with 52% growth over the previous year. In growth, Go swapped places with Javascript, which fell to the second spot with 44%.

Source: octoverse.github.com

In Stack Overflow's 2017 developer survey , Go was the only language that was both on the top 5 most loved and top 5 most wanted languages. People who use Go, love it, and the people who aren’t using Go, want to be.

Source: insights.stackoverflow.com/survey/2017

Go: The language of Cloud Infrastructure

In 2014, analyst Donnie Berkholz called Go the emerging language of cloud infrastructure. By 2017, Go has emerged as the language of cloud infrastructure. Today, every single cloud company has critical components of their cloud infrastructure implemented in Go including Google Cloud, AWS, Microsoft Azure, Digital Ocean, Heroku and many others. Go is a key part of cloud companies like Alibaba, Cloudflare, and Dropbox. Go is a critical part of open infrastructure including Kubernetes, Cloud Foundry, Openshift, NATS, Docker, Istio, Etcd, Consul, Juju and many more. Companies are increasingly choosing Go to build cloud infrastructure solutions.

Go’s Great Community

It may be hard to imagine that only four years ago the Go community was transitioning from online-only to include in-person community with its first conference. Now the Go community has had over 30 conferences all around the world with hundreds of presentations and tens of thousands of attendees. There are hundreds of Go meetups meeting monthly covering much of the globe. Wherever you live, you are likely to find a Go meetup nearby.

Two different organizations have been established to help with inclusivity in the Go community, Go Bridge and Women Who Go; the latter has grown to over 25 chapters. Both have been instrumental in offering free trainings. In 2017 alone over 50 scholarships to conferences have been given through efforts of Go Bridge and Women Who Go.

This year we had two significant firsts for the Go project. We had our first contributor summit where people from across the Go community came together to discuss the needs and future of the Go project. Shortly after, we had the first Go contributor workshop where hundreds of people came to make their first Go contribution.

Photo by Sameer Ajmani

Go’s impact on open source

Go has become a major force in the world of open source powering some of the most popular projects and enabling innovations across many industries. Find thousands of additional applications and libraries at awesome-go. Here are just a handful of the most popular:

  • Moby (formerly Docker) is a tool for packaging and running applications in lightweight containers. Its creator Solomon Hykes cited Go's standard library, concurrency primitives, and ease of deployment as key factors, and said "To put it simply, if Docker had not been written in Go, it would not have been as successful."
  • Kubernetes is a system for automating deployment, scaling and management of containerized applications. Initially designed by Google and used in the Google cloud, Kubernetes now is a critical part of every major cloud offering.
  • Hugo is now the most popular open-source static website engine. With its amazing speed and flexibility, Hugo makes building websites fun again. According to w3techs, Hugo now has nearly 3x the usage of Jekyll, the former leader.
  • Prometheus is an open source monitoring solution and time series database that powers metrics and alerting designed to be the system you go to during an outage to allow you to quickly diagnose problems.
  • Grafana is an open source, feature-rich metrics dashboard and graph editor for Graphite, Elasticsearch, OpenTSDB, Prometheus and InfluxDB.
  • Lantern delivers fast, reliable and secure access to blocked websites and apps.
  • Syncthing is an open-source cross platform peer-to-peer continuous file synchronization application
  • Keybase is a new and free security app for mobile phones and computers. Think of it as an open source Dropbox & Slack with end-to-end encryption public-key cryptography.
  • Fzf is an interactive Unix filter for command-line that can be used with any list; files, command history, processes, hostnames, bookmarks, git commits, etc. Fzf supports Unix, macOS and has beta support for Windows. It also can operate as a vim plugin.

Many of these authors have said that their projects would not exist without Go. Some like Kubernetes and Docker created entirely new solutions. Others like Hugo, Syncthing and Fzf created more refined experiences where many solutions already existed. The popularity of these applications alone is proof that Go is a ideal language for a broad set of use cases.

Thank You

This is the eighth time we have had the pleasure of writing a birthday blog post for Go and we continue to be overwhelmed by and grateful for the enthusiasm and support of the Go community.

Since Go was first open sourced we have had 10 releases of the language, libraries and tooling with more than 1680 contributors making over 50,000 commits to the project's 34 repositories; More than double the number of contributors and nearly double the number of commits from only two years ago. This year we announced that we have begun planning Go 2, our first major revision of the language and tooling.

The Go team would like to thank everyone who has contributed to the project, whether you participate by contributing changes, reporting bugs, sharing your expertise in design discussions, writing blog posts or books, running events, attending or speaking at events, helping others learn or improve, open sourcing Go packages you wrote, contributing artwork, introducing Go to someone, or being part of the Go community. Without you, Go would not be as complete, useful, or successful as it is today.

Thank you, and here’s to eight more years!

By Steve Francia

See the index for more articles.