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Workplace usage of Google’s Go language is expanding, according to the Go Developer Survey 2020. And like last year’s survey, recent results show the predominant industry where Go developers work is the technology industry.
According to findings, 76 per cent of respondents were using the Go language at work, compared to 73 per cent last year while 66 per cent said Go was critical to company success, up from 59 per cent in 2019. Forty-six per cent of respondents said technology was their primary industry, compared to 43 per cent in 2019, followed by 12 per cent citing financial services in 2020.
Overall satisfaction with the language was at 92 per cent. There was almost universal adoption of Go modules, with 96 per cent regularly using them for Go package management. And only 26 per cent of respondents said that Go was missing a critical language feature that they needed.
Among those who did need a critical missing feature, 88 per cent of them said they needed generics, 58 per cent said they needed better error handling, and 44 per cent said they needed null safety. Generics could arrive in Go later this year. A formal proposal for the capability was announced in January.
The survey gathered 9,648 responses, although not everyone answered every question. Some questions were shown to all while other questions were shown to a random subset of respondents.
Other findings of the Go Developer Survey 2020 include that 53 per cent program in another language other than Go at work, down from 54 per cent last year and 63 per cent in 2018. In addition, 68 per cent work with Go in web programming, followed by 46 per cent in databases and 42 per cent in devops.
Delving deeper, 33 per cent said it took them from one to three months to be productive with Go. Linux led the way as the most commonly used platform for Go developers, at 63 per cent, followed by 55 per cent who reported developing with Go on MacOS. Visual Studio Code was the most popular editor used with Go, with 41 per cent of respondents using it.
