GitHub has published its annual report on the State of the Octoverse and its growth has been phenomenal. The headline statistics are that, having welcomed more than 8 million new users since last year, GitHub now has more than 31 million developers and more than 2.1 million organizations. 

GitHub now hosts more than 96 million repositories, of which almost a third were created in the last year, and over 200 million pull requests and again over a third of these are from the last 12 months.

One respect in which there has been no change from last year is in the last year is in the top languages - JavaScript has been top back to 2014, with Java coming in second. Python, PHP and C++ and C# remain in the next four positions. TypeScript, however, has shot up the league to occupy the seventh slot, while C has slipped from 7 to 9  and Ruby from 9 to 10.

When it comes to growth in languages it is Kotlin that has out-performed the rest, followed most closely by HCL - a human readable language for DevOps built by HashiCorp. TypeScript has almost twice as contributors over the year and PowerShell and Rust are tied with a growth rate of 1.7 times. 

When we first reported on GitHub's State of the Universe in 2016 we were surprised the Microsoft came top of the list of organizations with the most open source contributors, with 16.4K contributors, compared to Facebook's 15.6K. This year Microsoft again tops the list of organizations whose contribute most to open source with 7700 employees having committed code to a repo's master branch during the past 12 months. Google is now in second place (5500) and Red Hat (3300) and Facebook has slipped to 7th position with 1700.

Even so Facebook's React Native is still second in the list of projects by number of contributors. It now stands at 10K which is a big increase from 6,250 in 2016, but a 50% decrease from 15K in 2017. Similarly Microsoft's VS Code shot up from 5,855 in 2016 to 24K in 2017 and now, still top of the list, has 19K. TensorFlow was in 5th place in 2017 with 8.3K contributors and now has not only risen to 3rd place in the list but has increased to 9.3K contributors

Looking at the fastest growing projects it is a Microsoft one, azure-docs, that tops the list with an impressive 4.7 times increase in contributors, taking it to 5th position in the top projects. The PyTorch project comes second in terms of growth of number of contributors

It is going to be interesting to compare this year's figures with next year's when Microsoft's plan to purchase GitHub, for $7.5 million - for which a final ruling is expected October 19th - should have taken effect. When the acquisition was announced in June there was a flurry of concern that some GitHub projects might lose their long-standing volunteer contributors. This year's State of the Octoverse shows no signs of any adverse reaction.

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