A new developer survey shows that the popularity of C#, the main language of Microsoft's .NET platform, has fallen from third to sixth within three years. However, in absolute terms, the use of C# is still growing, and It is especially popular in game development. The research company Slashdata surveyed more than 17,000 developers worldwide in the 19th "State of the Developer Country" report.
Researchers deliberately try to measure the absolute number of programming language users, rather than simply looking at relative popularity like the indexes of companies such as StackOverflow or Redmonk.
According to the report, JavaScript tops the list with 12.4 million active software developers, followed by Python with 9 million and Java with 8.2 million. The next three are equally divided, with C/C++ at 6.3 million, PHP at 6.1 million, and C# at 6 million. TypeScript is included in the JavaScript numbers.
Slashdata compared these data with mid-2017 data, noting that JavaScript developers increased by 5 million during this period, and Java increased by 1.6 million developers. There is no specific data on Python's growth since 2017, but the researchers said that, driven by the rising use of data science and machine learning, it added 2.2 million developers last year alone.
C#'s performance is not so good. "C# has dropped three rankings in the past three years, mainly due to its slower growth compared to C/C++ and PHP," the report noted. "C# may maintain its dominance in the game and AR/VR developer ecosystem, but it seems to be losing its advantage in desktop development-probably due to the emergence of cross-platform tools based on Web technology."
The report added that C# is least popular in data science, machine learning, and mobile, and can only be said to be tepid, while JavaScript, Java and PHP score high in these areas.
The high usage rate of C# in games is mainly due to its presence in popular game engines. Microsoft recently mentioned Unity and CryEngine that use C# to write scripts, as well as .NET game engines such as MonoGame and Stride.
Although Microsoft will be happy to see the popularity of .NET in game development, it is likely to see the use of the Internet and the cloud as a more strategic use because this is consistent with the profitable enterprise software market.
However, in these categories, JavaScript, Java and PHP seem to have won more developers than C#, although as in the past, the original data will not explain the whole situation, and the corporate sector may prefer C# instead of PHP, etc. select.
This survey is not optimistic for .NET, indicating that it is being replaced by alternatives in the most strategic market, and the effort to establish .NET in the mobile field through Xamarin technology has not won enough developers - Although we can speculate that if Microsoft does not open source .NET, then cross-platform C# will decline even more.
Slashdata also studied the use of cloud technology, asking developers about their technical preferences and the reasons for adopting or rejecting cloud technology. They found that back-end developers like containers, with an adoption rate of 60%, followed by database as a service (45%) and cloud platform as a service (32%). Container orchestration is also very popular (27%), more than half of which are Kubernetes. Serverless, that is, services such as AWS Lambda or Azure Cloud Functions account for 26%. But what drives these choices? The most important factors are price, support and documentation richness, as well as ease of use and speed of development. In Slashdata's survey results, performance is called the least important factor.
What is more noteworthy is the reason for not adopting cloud technology. So far, the top spot on the list is price, especially when it comes to virtual machine infrastructure as a service. 48% of developers mentioned the price issue, but for other categories such as database as a service (38%) and serverless (34%) The same is true.