Most developers using the Google-backed Go programming language still enjoy using it, but lament the lack of features and library selection available with Python.
The Go team surveyed 11,840 developers about 2021 Developer Survey and found that 54% were “very satisfied” with the state of the language while 38% said they were “somewhat satisfied”. However, like Google user experience study Alice Merrick notesfaces that 92% of respondents are generally at least “satisfied” with Go, consistent with previous surveys.
Research shows that the main reasons developers don’t use Go are its lack of features (39%) and lack of library support (34%) – the latter being Python’s main strength.
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However, the timing of this year’s survey probably doesn’t reflect what developers might think about Go right now. Its version 1.18 released in March; The survey was conducted between October 26 and November 16, 2021.
Over the years, so far most A common reason developers avoid Go is that it doesn’t support ‘generics’makes it inefficient to write code for different data types.
But since version 1.18, Steve Francia of Google’s Go team explained at the time, “users can merge that code into a single process while preserving security. Additionally, users are getting more readable and more performant code with the same type of security.” security that Go has always provided. It’s a significant ‘benefit’ to productivity and performance.”
This year’s survey also found generics to be the most common missing key trait, but Merrick expects attitudes to change in next year’s survey. Generics also have an impact on the second major obstacle to the adoption of Go, its typology system. The Go team is unlikely to change the type system until they see how the developers rate with the aid of common metrics.
“We wanted to see how introducing generics could affect or address the underlying needs around Go’s type system before making additional changes,” says Merrick.
The survey shows that Go’s biggest competitors are Rust, Python, Java, and TypeScript. Rust and Go, both are system programming languages, highly rated by developersbut neither language is as popular as JavaScript and Python.
However, the survey highlights that Rust, powered by AWS, Google and Microsoft, is Go’s biggest competitor. When asked which language developers chose over Go for a project, 25% said it was Rust, 17% chose Python, 12% chose Java, 8% chose TypeScript, and 8% chose C#.
“Rust, Python, and Java are the most popular choices. Rust and Go has free feature setsso Rust can be a good choice when Go doesn’t meet the feature demand for a project,” Merrick noted.
“The main reasons for using Python are the lack of libraries and existing infrastructure support, so Python’s large package ecosystem can make it difficult to migrate to Go.”
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According to this year’s survey, Microsoft’s VS Code remains the most popular code editor among Go users, followed by IntelliJ.
The order of major cloud providers that Go users deploy is different from other surveys, which often place AWS in first place, followed by Azure, with Google Cloud Platform (GCP) catching up. In the Go developer survey, AWS leads with 43%, followed by company-owned servers with 41%, then GCP with 25% and Azure with 12%.
The survey for Go developers pointed to some notable trends in container technology and Kubernetes. Today, 35% of respondents deploy Go applications to the AWS Elastic Kubernetes Service, up from 30% the previous year. But only 41% deploy Go programs to AWS virtual machines, down from 48% in the past two years.
