Finishing | Zhang Yuming is responsible for editing | Zhang Hongyue
produced | CSDN (ID: CSDNnews)
In recent years, the Go language, which includes C syntax, has high performance, high efficiency and is easy to use, has been welcomed by developers at home and abroad since its launch, and many developers have listed it as one of their favorite languages. In the "StackOverflow Developer Survey 2021", developers using the Go language salaries ranked in the top ten. 
Go officially surveyed 11,840 developers, the largest number of participants in the survey in six years. In 2021, the Go Developer Report will be released, and it will conduct a comprehensive survey of Go developer portraits, technical tools, developer evaluations, etc., to give you an in-depth understanding of the current status of the Go language.
Here are some key findings from the report:
- Developer satisfaction with Go is generally high, with 92% of developers satisfied with Go. 70% of respondents use Go at work, and 81% are confident in Go's future prospects;
- The lack of key libraries, language features, and infrastructure is a common feature reported by Go developers. Respondents want to prioritize improvements to debugging and dependency management;
- The biggest challenges when working with modules are about version control, using private repositories, and multi-module workflows. (This survey was conducted prior to Go 1.18, which has seen numerous improvements, adding generics at the language level, adding Fuzzing, workspaces, and performance improvements)
Go developers: one person can also be a team
As a programming language, the majority of people using it are software developers (70%), with only a few working in IT or DevOps. Although there has been a "transcoding fever" in recent years, many amateurs have also begun to learn some programming languages to enrich their spare time. But most of them are still professional coders, and 76% of the respondents said they use the Go language for project development at work, the same figure as in 2020.
Judging from the survey data, the vast majority of respondents are employed by enterprises or small and medium-sized enterprises, about a quarter of users are employed by start-ups, and the proportion of consulting companies and public institutions is very low.
In addition, although the work of programmers often gives the impression of a large amount of work, a lot of work, and hair loss, most development teams are not large, most of them are less than 10 people, and even 8% of them are fighting alone , a person is a team.
It is said that it is the norm for programmers to work overtime, often day and night are reversed, and work is integrated into life. No, 31% of the respondents are using the Go language on weekends (maybe overtime or hobbies). 55% of people use Go at work.
In the past two years, in addition to programmers everywhere, there have also been more "programmers" in the development circle. But women still make up just 2 percent of Go developers, about the same as last year.
As an industry with intense "involution", many developers will enhance their competitiveness by improving their skills, and they will learn several languages. Go development is no exception. 51% of developers learn a new language on the job, but a large majority choose to quietly “roll in” off campus or outside of work (45%).
So how do you learn it? Most developers learn by themselves, and rarely study in groups, because the most important thing is the ability to think independently. When you want to learn a new skill, search the Internet, there are all kinds of methods, and all kinds of teaching videos are dazzling. So which are the most useful methods? 64% of Go developers find it most useful to learn a new programming language by reading reference documentation, followed by writing tutorials, watching source code, or through live teaching (online or offline) .
Building API/PRC services still dominates
The survey found that building API/PRC services is by far the most common use of Go by far (49%), with data processing surprisingly becoming the second most common use.
Go has strong execution ability and high development efficiency. Since the release of version 1.0, it has attracted the attention of many developers and has been widely used. Many companies, especially cloud computing companies, have begun to use Go to refactor their infrastructure, and many of them are directly using Go for development. For example, the popular Docker is developed using Go. 75% of respondents use Go after evaluating Go.
But no language is perfect.
- Go is missing the required functionality.
- Other languages better support existing tools and facilities.
- The Go ecosystem lacks required libraries.
These three points are the main reasons why developers do not choose Go to develop projects.
So, which language did they use when Go was not an option?
Rust, Python, Java are the most common choices. Rust and Go have complementary feature sets, so Rust is a good choice when Go doesn't meet the functional needs of a project. The most common reason to use Java is because Go lacks some features, but this problem may be somewhat solved with the introduction of generics in version 1.18.
Developer Comments: Go is doing well in the team
Go seems to have consistently won over the majority of those who have used it, with 92% of Go developers saying they were satisfied with Go in the past year.
Community attitudes fluctuate slightly from year to year. But 91% of developers believe that "Go is doing well in teams," a figure that hit a nearly three-year high.
81% of respondents are very confident about Go's future prospects. But developers willing to contribute to the Go project dropped to 61% from 64% last year.
A special kind of questioning was adopted this year to explore the priorities for improvement: "If you had 10 GopherCoins that you could use to improve Go, how would you allocate your coins?" Dependency management and diagnostic errors, based on respondents' votes Two areas need more improvement.
Go developers prefer Linux and VS Code
Linux remains the most popular system for Go developers (63%), followed by macOS (55%). However, the number of developers developing on Linux seems to be decreasing year by year, while the number of developers developing on Windows has increased from last year.
In addition, 91% of Go developers prefer to use VS Code as an editor. Of course, it is not only Go developers who prefer VS Code. According to the data reported by Stack Overflow developers, Visual Studio Code has clearly become the preferred IDE for developers. Used by 71.06% of developers.
More than 90% of developers will deploy Go to Linux. It is also worth noting that although Go development on Windows systems is not as high as on macOS systems, more people deploy Go to Windows systems (18%) than to deploy Go to macOS system (15%).
Go in cloud services
Go was designed with modern distributed computing in mind, and Go officials want to continue to improve the experience of developers building cloud services with Go. So, this year, the official percentage of Go programs deployed to the world's top three cloud providers (Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud Platform, and Microsoft Azure) remained unchanged, and on-premises deployments to self-owned or company-owned servers continued to decline.
Reference: https://go.dev/blog/survey2021-results