1. Write in front
GITHUB OCTOVERSE is an open source trend survey initiated by GITHUB, the world's largest code hosting platform, to explore new trends in open source and their impact on developers and software companies. By analyzing the survey report of GITHUB OCTOVERSE 2022, we can discover some trends in the open source circle. In addition, this article will not only give you a detailed interpretation of the results of the GITHUB OCTOVERSE 2022 survey report, but also include some of the author's understanding of the report results.
Survey address: https://octoverse.github.com/
2. The overall trend
2-1. Overview
As of 2022, 94 million developers are already using GitHub, and more than 90% of companies are using GitHub. From these two figures, we can see that GitHub, the world's largest code hosting platform, has been widely used by developers and software companies.
Of course, more importantly, developers have submitted a total of 413 million open source contributions in 2022, which means that the open source ecosystem has grown to a very large scale.
2-2. Important trends
In this year's report, there are three trends worthy of attention:
1. "Infrastructure as code" has become a major trend.
Developers will heavily use Hashicorp Configuration Language (HCL), Shell, and Go languages in 2022. At the same time, HCL has also become the fastest growing language on GitHub. This shows that the practice of infrastructure as code (IaC) is increasingly being adopted by projects on GitHub, including open source projects.
For getting started with HCL & Terraform, you can refer to this tutorial: https://developer.hashicorp.com/terraform/cdktf/concepts/hcl-interoperability
2. Large software technology companies are building large open source communities.
In 2022, many large-scale open source projects on GitHub will receive commercial support, and these investments will also feed back the open source ecosystem, allowing more people to contribute to open source. According to statistics, more than 30% of Fortune 100 companies now have an open source strategy office, and this number will continue to increase.
3. Contributors who have just joined the open source community prefer projects with commercial support.
According to statistics, 50% of the contributors who submitted open source code for the first time submitted code to open source projects with commercial support. Of course, most of this 50% of contributors are Independent Contributors (ICs), not developers of the organizations these projects belong to. This speaks to the high brand recognition that comes with commercially backed open source projects, and it also reflects that a company's investment in open source does ultimately feed back into the project itself. From Flutter to Next.JS, from React to VS Code, company-led open source projects have become an integral part of the developer ecosystem on GitHub.
3. Developers
In 2022, the number of developers on GitHub will increase by 27% year-on-year, with 20.5 million new developers joining. The total number of contributions on GitHub has reached 3.5 billion. These all show that the open source ecosystem is booming, attracting more and more developers to join it.
3-1. AI is improving code writing efficiency
When it comes to AI-assisted coding, you have to mention GitHub Copilot, which has become popular this year. Through a survey of developers who use GitHub Copilot, we found that developers who use AI code assistance tools can complete tasks faster, have a better development experience, and nearly double the efficiency of code writing.
4. Region
Among the developers using GitHub, the top three countries with the largest number of developers are the United States, China, and India, and these three countries are indeed the three countries with the fastest growing software industry in the world today. Therefore, it is not difficult to see that the development of the software industry and open source are closely related.
PS: The 2022 survey cannot be released due to the map, so here is a 2021 survey.
As for the new developers in 2022, we can see that India will grow very rapidly, followed by China and Brazil. If this growth rate continues, India is expected to have the same number of developers as GitHub in the US by 2025.
5. Development language
In 2022, developers are building software on GitHub using nearly 500 programming languages.
JavaScript remains number one and is the most used language in the open source community.
Languages such as HCL are growing the fastest due to the explosion of IaC.
Python had the highest growth rate at 22.5%.
The usage of PHP in 2022 will decrease to a certain extent.
5-1. Development language usage
Looking at the change chart of the usage of programming languages in the open source community in recent years, we can find that:
- JS has always maintained the first place, which is related to the relatively low learning cost of JS, powerful functions (both front-end and back-end mobile terminals can be written), complete ecology (NPM), and high efficiency of small and medium-sized application development (one JS shuttle, one MVP version a week ) and other characteristics are inseparable.
- With the development of data mining and machine learning in recent years, Python has now climbed to the second position.
- The old programming language JAVA is still the main language used by open source contributors, but the usage rate has been squeezed to the third place by Python.
5-2. Growth of development languages
And if we look at the growth rate, we can also find a lot of interesting things:
- HCL usage has grown significantly over the past year. This is driven by both the popularity of Terraform and the growth of IaC practices. And as automated deployments become more and more accepted, we see a significant growth in Shell.
- Rust has grown by more than 50%, mainly because of its safety and reliability.
- TS is riding on the free ride of the continuous prosperity of the JS ecology, and it is also developing rapidly, and now it also has a growth rate of 37.8%.
- Lua is heavily used in game development as a simple scripting language for everything from games to app development to IoT.
- Go is also growing steadily as the language of choice for developers of projects like Docker and Kubernetes.
6. Open Source Projects
6-1. The open source project with the largest number of contributors
It can be seen that the projects with the largest number of contributors are almost all projects with commercial support, including microsoft/vscode, flutter/flutter and vercel/next.js. And what's more interesting is that they are all closely related to the big front-end field.
One exception, the open source home automation project home-assistant/core, has seen significant growth over the past year.
6-2. Open source projects with the fastest growing contributors
And analyzing the fastest growing open source projects in 2022, we can also find some commonalities:
- Overall contributors to engines, development kits, and frameworks grew the fastest year-over-year.
- home-assistant/core has grown rapidly over the past year, indicating growing developer interest in home automation.
- microsoft/PowerToys, as a set of Windows-based utility tools, has attracted a large number of developers to participate in the project.
- As a full-stack development framework, remix-run/remix is also favored by developers.
7. Company
In 2022, most of the large open source projects on GitHub will be led or maintained by a company or an organization.
And these company-led open source projects focus on code editors, frameworks, and programming languages, and they attract a lot of contributors on GitHub. From microsoft/vscode to tensorflow/tensorflow, most of these projects have been on the list in the Octoverse report. Their success illustrates the enormous impact commercially backed open source projects can have on the wider open source ecosystem.
It is worth noting that most of the contributions from developers outside the organization are comments, issues, and review PRs. In other words, developers inside the organization are still contributing code to their company's projects at a much higher rate than external contributors. this means--
Companies have the most active open source communities when they let developers contribute as part of the community rather than just releasing code under an open source license.
Eight, the next step of open source
What's next for open source? No one can give a definite answer. Since the development of software technology, it has been crucial in business, government, and social development—and open source is often at the forefront of software technology.
For example, in the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic, there were open source organizations working with WHO to standardize its internal software development process and create the first open source project office in the United Nations to support the use of WHO staff around the world. , produce and release open source tools to address the challenges of COVID-19.
Some people say that one of the biggest advantages of open source in the social field is that it can reduce duplication of work, which is crucial to reducing internal friction and improving efficiency.
It has also been said that open source can also bring the global community together, promoting and producing more inclusive and diverse technologies.
Others say that open source makes reliable and excellent technical solutions more accessible on a global scale, helping to promote fairness in the world.
……
I believe that every developer who participates in open source has his own understanding of the future of open source, but in short, I would like to thank all those who have contributed to the open source ecosystem this year!