This year's survey of Eclipse developers shows they have changed their loyalties as regards the code management system they use over the past four years.

The first Eclipse Community Survey was conducted in 2007 and it has been repeated on an annual basis since 2009.  This year's report is based on 876 completed responses, only a small decrease from last year's 920 but well down compared to 2010, when there were 1,696 completed surveys.

Despite the fact that the survey's language is English, in several years the survey's respondents have been predominantly from Germany due to its promotion on the Heise developer portal. For the 2014 survey the largest proportion of the respondents (17%) came from US with Germany next (15%).

Satisfaction with Eclipse fell sharply between 2012 when 90% of respondents answered Satisfied or Very satisfied and 2013 when it fell to 81%, and this year saw this lower level of satifaction continue:

On the other hand in there has been a recovery in use of most recent version of Eclipse and also early uptake of the upcoming version:

In his announcement of the availability of the results, Ian Skerrett comments:

As in other years, I think the results provide an interesting perspective on what tools software developers are using and the type of applications they are building.

He notes that:

"Git has finally surpassed Subversion to be the top code management tool used by software developers. A third of developers (33.3%) report they use Git as their primary code management tool compared to 30.7% using Subversion ... 9.6% claim GitHub is their primary code management tool so the prevalence of overall Git usage is becoming dominant.

This chart shows how this has been a steady process over the past four years:

Another ongoing trend is one away from Windows. Initially Windows was replaced by Linux. However, as this chart shows, Mac OS is gaining share at the expense of Linux This result may be an artifact of the geographical distribution of survey respondents and the growing importance of mobile, and thus iOS, development.

Given that Eclipse stated as a Java IDE it is no surprise that Java is the top primary languages used by survey respondents (79%). However, this chart shows that a large proportion (56%) that also write JavaScript code:

Skerret notes:

For Build and Release tools, Maven and Jenkins continue to be key tools used by developers. Of interest is the growth of Gradle from 2013 (4.5%) to 2014 (11%);

Another result that he draws attention to is in relation to the Internet of Things (IOT) and Open Hardware which, he comments, have become important industry trends in the last couple of years. He notes that: over a third (35.7%) of software developers are spending their own personal time learning about devices like the BeagleBone, Arduino and Raspberry Pi.

As in previous years the survey also the reveals the extent to which members of the Eclipse Community develop software in their own time:

Over two-thirds of respondents participate in open source projects, and over half of them work for organizations that use and contribute to open source software. 

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