In August 2023, the Go team at Google conducted our bi-annual survey of Go developers. We recruited participants via a public post on the Go blog and a randomized prompt in VS Code, resulting in 4,005 responses. We primarily focused survey questions around a few topics: general sentiment and feedback about developing with Go, technology stacks used alongside Go, how developers start new Go projects, recent experiences with toolchain error messages, and understanding developer interest around ML/AI. By Todd Kulesza.
Some interesting points in results from the survey:
- Go developers said they are more interested in AI/ML tooling that improves the quality, reliability, and performance of code they write, rather than writing code for them
- The top requests for improving toolchain warnings and errors were to make the messages more comprehensible and actionable
- Our experiment with project templates (gonew) appears to solve critical problems for Go developers (especially developers new to Go) and does so in a way that matches their existing workflows for starting a new project
- Three out of every four respondents work on Go software that also uses cloud services
- Developer sentiment towards Go remains extremely positive, with 90% of survey respondents saying they felt satisfied while working with Go during the prior year
Survey typically finds that the longer someone has worked with Go, the more likely they are to report being satisfied with it. This trend continued in 2023; among respondents with less than one year of Go experience, 82% reported satisfaction with the Go development experience, compared to the 94% of Go developers with five or more years of experience. Follow the link for full results. Really good read for anybody interested in Go!
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