Results of the 2021 Go Developer Survey, its sixth edition, show a very high level of satisfaction among users of the language and confidence in the long term direction of the Go project.

The newly published results come from a survey conducted during October/November 2021 which had 11,840 responses. This was the largest turnout in the 6 years of the survey and the increase can be attributed to a new strategy for recruiting participants. As well as publicizing the survey on the Go Blog and having it was picked up on social channels including Twitter, Reddit and Hacker News (and in 2019 I Programmer), a random sample of users of the VS Code plug-in were invited to participate. The ratio of self-selected to randomly selected respondents was almost 7:3. 

The were two differences between the self-selected and randomly sampled groups. Unsurprisingly when ask about their editor of choice the latter opted for VS Code! However VS Code was also the top choice randomly sampled group (42%) but a sizeable percentage (37%) preferred goLand or IntelliJ. The two command-line editors, Vim and Emacs, were only preferred by 1% each of the randomly sampled group while 13% of the self-selected group opted for Vim and another 3% for Emacs.

On the whole the randomly sampled respondents had less experience of Go, with 44% being classed as new Gophers (those using Go for less than a year) compared to 28% among the self-selected respondents. 

When the survey was initiated in 2016 more respondents programmed in Go outside of work compared to at work but since them the reverse has been true and for 2021 76% of respondents selected "I program at work in Go", the same percentage as the previous year. There was a decline in the percentage of respondents choosing the answer "I program in Go outside of work" but still over half of respondents selected it. There was also a decline in the percentage who programmed in another language at work. A new question in the survey revealed that 1 in 5 survey respondents were learning Go or wanted to learn it.

The most popular uses for Go remained as writing API/RPC services and for command line interfaces. However, the language is used in IoT, games and for Machine Learning/AI and even for mobile apps.

As in previous years Go developers were highly positive about the language and committed to using it in future.

Overall 92% of respondents were either very satisfied or slightly satisfied using Go during 2021 and a new question in the survey revealed that 81% were confident in the long term direction of the Go project.

More Information

Go Developer Survey 2021 Results

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