Go-based clients generated 20% of automated API requests on Cloudflare’s network in 2025, up from 12% in 2024. That figure counts deployed software, not developer opinion. This post works through Go programming language usage across four primary datasets, each figure carrying its period and what it actually measures.
Go Programming Language Usage
How Many Developers Use Go?
JetBrains estimates 2.2 million professional developers use Go as their primary programming language, double its figure from five years earlier. Counting developers who use Go as a secondary language, the estimate exceeds 5 million.
Stack Overflow measures something narrower: the share of its own opt-in respondents who did extensive development work in a language over the past year. Go moved up 2.9 percentage points between the 2024 and 2025 editions.
| Survey edition | Go share, all respondents | Responses to language question |
|---|---|---|
| Stack Overflow 2024 | 13.5% | 60,171 |
| Stack Overflow 2025 | 16.4% | 31,771 |
Source: Stack Overflow Developer Survey, 2024 and 2025 editions. Opt-in survey; shares describe respondents, not the global developer population.
Among professional developers only, Go reached 17.4% in 2025, against 14.4% in 2024. The 2025 survey drew fewer language responses than 2024, so the two samples are not identical in size or composition.
Go usage by respondent group, Stack Overflow 2025
JetBrains also reports 11% of all software developers planned to adopt Go within 12 months, placing it fourth on the firm’s Language Promise Index behind TypeScript, Rust and Python. For the wider field, see the breakdown of the most used programming languages by index and survey.
Go Programming Language Usage in Automated API Traffic
Cloudflare identifies API requests that are not coming from a person using a browser or native mobile app, then classifies the client library language. This measures software in production rather than stated preference.
Go led this measure in 2025 at 20%. Node.js, second the prior year, fell to fourth.
| API client language | Share in 2024 | Share in 2025 |
|---|---|---|
| Go | 12% | 20% |
| Python | 9.6% | 17% |
| Java | 7.4% | 11.2% |
| Node.js | Not reported | 8.3% |
| .NET | Not reported | 2.3% |
Source: Cloudflare Radar 2025 Year in Review, data spanning January 1 to December 2, 2025, with 2024 comparisons as published. Shares of automated API requests, not developer counts.
Share of automated API requests by client language
The container and cloud tooling covered in Kubernetes and container adoption data runs on service-to-service calls of exactly this kind, and Go supplies a large share of those SDKs and agents.
What Do Developers Build With Go?
The Go team ran its 2025 survey between September 9 and 30, 2025, publishing results on January 21, 2026. Command-line tools and API services remain the top answers, and 55% of respondents build both.
| Workload | Share of respondents |
|---|---|
| Build both CLIs and API services | 55% |
| Build cloud infrastructure tooling | Over one third |
| Work with ML models, tools or agents | 11% |
Source: Go Developer Survey 2025, fielded September 2025, 5,379 responses used after data cleaning. Multiple-selection question; values do not sum to 100%.
Deployment is close to uniform: 96% ship to Linux-based systems including containers. Embedded and IoT deployment rose from 2% to 8% of respondents, the only meaningful change since 2024. That Linux dependency shows up throughout DevOps and CI/CD pipeline usage.
Where teams deploy Go programs, 2025
Company-owned servers at 44% sit two points below AWS at 46%. Self-hosting is more common among Go teams than a cloud-first framing suggests, though Linux usage across cloud providers remains substantial.
Half the respondents, 51%, work at organisations of 2 to 500 people, against 30% at employers above 1,000. Three quarters have six or more years of professional development experience.
Go Programming Language Usage of Frameworks and Routers
JetBrains filtered its 2025 ecosystem survey to respondents naming Go as their primary language. The standard library’s net/http remains the most common routing choice, and the built-in testing package the most frequent test tool.
| Library | Category | Share using regularly, 2025 |
|---|---|---|
| Gin | Web framework | 48% |
| testify | Testing | 27% |
| gomock | Testing | 21% |
| gorilla/mux | HTTP router | 17% |
| Echo | Web framework | 16% |
| chi | HTTP router | 12% |
| Fiber | Web framework | 11% |
| Beego | Web framework | 4% |
Source: JetBrains State of Developer Ecosystem Report 2025, surveyed April to June 2025, 24,534 developers after cleaning, filtered to Go-primary respondents. Multiple-selection questions; values total more than 100%.
Gin and gorilla/mux, 2020 against 2025
Gin rose from 41% in 2020 to 48% in 2025. gorilla/mux fell from 36% to 17% over the same span; its maintainers archived the project in 2023, and Go 1.22 added pattern routing to http.ServeMux.
Router and framework usage, 2025
Go Programming Language Usage of AI Coding Tools
Adoption is high and sentiment is not. Go itself scored 91% satisfaction in the same survey, with 62% “very satisfied”; AI tooling scored 55%, weighted toward “somewhat satisfied” at 42% against 13% “very satisfied”.
| Measure | Share of respondents |
|---|---|
| Use AI-powered tools daily when writing Go | 53% |
| Do not use them at all, or used them a few times in the past month | 29% |
| Satisfied with AI-powered development tools | 55% |
| Primarily use these tools as unsupervised agents | 17% |
| Not building AI-powered features into their Go software | 78% |
Source: Go Developer Survey 2025, fielded September 9 to 30, 2025, 5,379 responses used.
A majority, 53%, named non-functional generated code as their main problem with these tools, and 30% said even working code was poor quality. Two thirds, 66%, report their Go software uses no AI functionality at all.
JetBrains puts regular AI assistant use among Go developers above 70%, counting assistants, agents and AI editors rather than daily use alone. The two surveys ask different questions of different samples and are not directly comparable. Broader tooling patterns appear in Linux ML and AI infrastructure data.
How Much Do Go Developers Earn?
Stack Overflow’s 2024 survey reported a median total annual compensation of $76,433 for Go developers, against $92,760 in its 2023 edition. Both figures are self-reported and global, drawn from 23,352 salary responses in 2024.
Stack Overflow did not publish a top-paying technologies breakdown in its 2025 edition, so the 2024 figure is the most recent from that dataset. JetBrains lists Scala, Go, Kotlin and Rust as its highest-earning language groups in 2025 without publishing a Go-specific median. Country-level context sits in developer salary comparisons by country.
FAQs
How many developers use Go?
JetBrains estimates 2.2 million professional developers use Go as their primary language in 2025, and more than 5 million counting those who use it as a secondary language.
Is Go programming language usage growing?
On two measures, yes. Stack Overflow’s respondent share rose from 13.5% in 2024 to 16.4% in 2025. Cloudflare’s automated API request share rose from 12% to 20% across the same years.
What is the most used Go web framework?
Gin, used regularly by 48% of Go-primary respondents in JetBrains’ 2025 survey. The standard library’s net/http remains the most common routing choice overall.
Does the Go Developer Survey recruit respondents through Reddit?
Yes. The Go team invited participants via the Go blog, social channels including Reddit, Bluesky, Mastodon and X, and randomised prompts in VS Code and GoLand. It received 7,070 responses and used 5,379 after cleaning.
Do most Go developers build AI features?
No. In the 2025 Go Developer Survey, 78% were not building AI-powered features into their Go software, and 66% said their software uses no AI functionality at all.
Sources
https://go.dev/blog/survey2025
https://blog.cloudflare.com/radar-2025-year-in-review/
https://survey.stackoverflow.co/2025/technology
https://blog.jetbrains.com/go/2025/11/10/go-language-trends-ecosystem-2025/
