Go Programmers Surveyed: Most Use Linux or MacOS

The Go team conducted a survey of Go Developers in August — and has just released the results. Among the findings: '90% of survey respondents saying they felt satisfied while working with Go during the prior year,' while 6% said they were dissastified.

Further, the number of people working with Go continues to increase; we see evidence of this from external research like Stack Overflow's Developer Survey (which found 14% of professional developers worked with Go during the past year, a roughly 15% year-over-year increase), as well as analytics for go.dev (which show an 8% rise in visitors year-over-year). Combining this growth with a high satisfaction score is evidence that Go continues to appeal to developers, and suggests that many developers who choose to learn the language feel good about their decision long afterwards...
As in prior years, the majority of survey respondents told us they work with Go on Linux (63%) and macOS (58%) systems... We do continue to see that newer members of the Go community are more likely to be working with Windows than more experienced Go developers. We interpret this as a signal that Windows-based development is important for onboarding new developers to the Go ecosystem, and is a topic our team hopes to focus on more in 2024...

While x86-compatible systems still account for the majority of development (89%), ARM64 is also now used by a majority of respondents (56%). This adoption appears to be partly driven by Apple Silicon; macOS developers are now more likely to say they develop for ARM64 than for x86-based architectures (76% vs. 71%). However, Apple hardware isn't the only factor driving ARM64 adoption: among respondents who don't develop on macOS at all, 29% still say they develop for ARM64.

The most-preferred code editors among the surveyed Go programmers were VS Code (44%), GoLand (31%), Vim/Neovim (16%), and Emacs (3%).
52% of the survey's respondents actually selected 'very satisfied' for their feelings about Go — the highest possible rating.

Other interesting findings:

' The top requests for improving toolchain warnings and errors were to make the messages more comprehensible and actionable; this sentiment was shared by developers of all experience levels, but was particularly strong among newer Go developers.'

'Three out of every four respondents work on Go software that also uses cloud services; this is evidence that developers see Go as a language for modern, cloud-based development.'

The experimental gonew tool (which offers predefined templates for instantiating new Go projects) '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. Based on these findings, we believe gonew can substantially reduce onboarding barriers for new Go developers and ease adoption of Go in organizations.'

And when it comes to AI, '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.'

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