Go developer survey report released: API/RPC services become the main use | 92% of respondents are satisfied

Recently, the GO Developer Center officially released the "2021 Go Developer Survey Report".

It is reported that the report collected a total of 11,840 responses from October 26 to November 16, 2021, making it the largest response since the survey was launched six years ago.

Among them, some key points in the report results are as follows:

• 92% of respondents remain highly satisfied with Go, with 75% using Go at work;
• The most common problems developers have with Go include "missing critical libraries, language features, and infrastructure" (Generics are already supported in Go 1.18);
• The biggest challenges when working with modules involve version control, using private repos, and multi-module workflows (resolved in Go 1.18);
• Respondents also want to prioritize improving "debugging and dependency management";
• 81% of respondents are confident in the long-term direction of the Go project.

76% of respondents program in Go: most API/RPC services

The report data shows that since 2019, 2020, and 2021, Go has been mainly used in the technology industry, followed by the financial services industry. Seventy percent of those respondents were software developers, with the majority working in IT or DevOps.

In addition, 76% of respondents said that they use Go programming at work, with API gateway and RPC microservice design work being the most used, followed by running interactive programs.

"Portrait" of new users: mainly large/small and medium-sized enterprises, who only use Go at work

The majority of respondents to this survey described their organization as a corporate or small to medium business, with around 25% describing their organization as a start-up, with the vast majority of respondents having fewer than 10 team members people. Among business types, consulting firms and public institutions are less common,

Additionally, more than half (55%) of respondents to the survey are at work every day, and respondents use Go less frequently outside of work.

2% women: The Go community values diversity and inclusion

The "gender identity" item of the survey report shows that female developers account for 2% of the survey respondents, the same as in previous years, which is another dimension to measure the inclusiveness of the Go community.

New challenge: 43% of respondents switch to/abandon Go

Combined with the "actual cases and reasons for not using Go programming" in the investigation report, in 2022, the Go team will fix and adjust some of the previous problems.

After asking respondents "whether they have evaluated Go in another language" in 2021, 43% said they had evaluated switching to Go, abandoning Go without an established programming language Or adopt Go.

Among them, 42% of respondents said "never", and 27% of respondents who previously used other programming languages later switched to Go. In addition, 80% of assessments were primarily for business reasons.

The most common use of Go programming: API/RPC services, followed by data processing

The survey report shows that so far, the most common "intended use" of Go is API/RPC services (49%), but the second "common expected use" is data processing (Data Processing accounts for 49%). than 10%), the same Web service also accounted for 10%.

90% of respondents have Linux as their operating system

As in previous years, the vast majority of respondents reported that they use Go on Linux (63%) and macOS (55%). Among them, from 2019 to 2021, the proportion of respondents who developed primarily on Linux decreased slightly.

More than 90% of respondents in the survey data use Linux as the dominant operating system, and although more respondents develop on macOS than on Windows, they deploy on Windows more often than macOS high.

Go technical bug investigation: Go 1.18 already supports generics to solve

For those who evaluated Go but did not use it, the survey report also asked what challenges are preventing them from using Go, and which of these are the main barriers:

Since this survey was conducted prior to the release of Go 1.18, which already supports generics, the survey results are ranked at the top such as "Lack of key features that need to be matched", "Lack of key libraries", "Lack of ecosystem/library support", etc. The most important technical barriers to these issues have been addressed.

Of course, the other most common missing feature has to do with Go's type system. Before making other changes, the Go side also needs to understand how the introduction of generics affects or solves the underlying requirements of the Go type system, and after gathering more information about the context of these requirements, explore different ways to meet these requirements in the future, For example through tools, libraries or changing the type system.

The report shows that, in line with last year, 92% of respondents said they were very or somewhat satisfied with their use of Go in the past year.

View the full report: https://go.dev/blog/survey2021-results