Go language satisfaction is off the charts

While developer satisfaction with the Google-developed Go language has remained very high, barriers to usage remain, including lack of critical libraries, language features, and infrastructure, according to the results of the Go Developer Survey 2021, which were released last week. The survey was conducted last fall.

Satisfaction with Go was at 92% during the past year, consistent with the previous year’s survey. Among the developers surveyed who did not use the language for a particular project, Go’s lack of features was cited by 39%. Go’s lack of libraries was cited by 34%. But the most commonly cited missing feature cited was generics, which was officially introduced in Go 1.18 in March, after the survey was taken.

The Go Developer Survey 2021 was taken between October 26 and November 16, 2021, and solicited 11,840 responses, the largest turnout in the survey’s six years. In other findings:

• 81% of respondents were confident in the long-term direction of the Go project.
• Challenges to using modules centered on versioning, use of private repos, and multi-module workflows. But Go 1.18 introduced workspaces, addressing many concerns.
• Chief applications for Go include API/RPC services, CLI, web services, and libraries or frameworks.
• Half of respondents wanted more guidance on best practices for Go performance optimization and project directory structure.
• The proportion of respondents who primarily developed with Go on Linux has been trending down, at 59% in the 2021 report as opposed to 63% in the 2020 report and 66% in 2019. Users who primarily developed with Go on Windows increased from 19% in the 2020 report to 24% in the current report. But 92% of respondents still target Linux for deployment of their Go applications.
• Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud Platform, and Microsoft Azure remain the most popular cloud platforms for Go developers.