Stack Overflow’s 2025 survey found 16.4% of respondents doing extensive work in Go, while Cloudflare traced 20% of 2025’s automated API requests to Go clients. One figure counts people, the other counts machine traffic. This set of Go language usage statistics covers survey shares, TIOBE’s September 2026 rank, API traffic, developer profiles, frameworks and AI tool use, with each number labeled by what it counts.
Go Language Usage Statistics
How Many Developers Use the Go Language in 2025?
Go’s share rose in all three respondent groups Stack Overflow tracked in both its 2024 and 2025 surveys. The question asks which languages people did extensive development work in over the past year, and the survey is opt-in.
Among all respondents, Go moved from 13.5% to 16.4%. Professional developers reached 17.4%, and people learning to code reached 13.1%.
| Respondent group | 2024 share | 2025 share |
|---|---|---|
| All respondents | 13.5% | 16.4% |
| Professional developers | 14.4% | 17.4% |
| Learning to code | 9.8% | 13.1% |
Source: Stack Overflow Developer Survey, 2024 and 2025 editions
The 2025 language question drew 31,771 responses, against 60,171 in 2024.
Professionals who use AI tools posted the highest Go share of the five groups Stack Overflow published in 2025, at 18.1%.
JetBrains puts the head count at 2.2 million professional developers using Go as their primary language, twice the figure from five years earlier. Counting professionals who use Go as a secondary language lifts the total above 5 million.
Source: JetBrains, State of Developer Ecosystem 2025 and Data Playground, 2025
Where Go Ranks in the 2025 Stack Overflow Language List
| Rank | Language | Share of all respondents |
|---|---|---|
| 11 | C | 22% |
| 12 | PHP | 18.9% |
| 13 | Go | 16.4% |
| 14 | Rust | 14.8% |
| 15 | Kotlin | 10.8% |
Source: Stack Overflow Developer Survey, 2025 edition
PHP sits one place above Go at 18.9%, and our PHP usage statistics break that share down further.
TypeScript ranks sixth at 43.6%; the TypeScript adoption figures track its climb.
Of respondents who worked with Go, 56.5% want to keep using it. Across all respondents, 23.4% want to work with Go over the next year.
Source: Stack Overflow Developer Survey, 2025 edition, admired and desired languages
One in Five Automated API Requests: Go Language Usage in Cloudflare’s 2025 Traffic
Go-based clients made 20% of the automated API requests Cloudflare observed in 2025, up from 12% in 2024. Python followed at 17%.
Cloudflare counts API requests it determines are not coming from a person using a browser or native mobile app, then identifies the client language. The shares count requests, not developers or projects.
| API client language | 2024 share of requests | 2025 share of requests |
|---|---|---|
| Go | 12% | 20% |
| Python | 9.6% | 17% |
| Java | 7.4% | 11.2% |
Source: Cloudflare Radar Year in Review, 2024 and 2025 editions
Java climbed to third at 11.2%; wider adoption data sits in our Java developer statistics.
Node.js, second in 2024, slipped to fourth at 8.3%, and .NET fell to 2.3%. Language-level trends for the Node.js ecosystem appear in our JavaScript market share data.
Is Go Losing Ground in TIOBE’s September 2026 Index?
TIOBE ranked Go 12th in September 2026 with a 1.10% rating, down from 8th a year earlier. Its rating fell 1.22 points over those twelve months.
| Language | Sep 2026 rank | Sep 2025 rank | Sep 2026 rating | 12-month change |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Rust | 10 | 18 | 1.34% | +0.33 pts |
| Fortran | 11 | 12 | 1.24% | -0.25 pts |
| Go | 12 | 8 | 1.10% | -1.22 pts |
| Delphi/Object Pascal | 13 | 9 | 1.08% | -1.18 pts |
Source: TIOBE Index, September 2026
Rust climbed from 18th to 10th in the same period and now sits two places above Go.
TIOBE bases its ratings on search-engine counts of skilled engineers, courses and third-party vendors. It states that the index does not measure the best language or the one with the most lines of code.
Python kept 1st place but lost 8.22 points, and C# held 5th while dropping 2.16 points, as our C# market share and developer figures detail.
Go was TIOBE’s Language of the Year in 2009 and 2016, an award given for the largest annual ratings rise.
Go Language Usage by Developer Profile and Deployment
91% of respondents to the 2025 Go Developer Survey said they were satisfied with Go, and 62% picked “very satisfied”. The Go team says satisfaction has held steady since it began asking in 2019.
The survey ran September 9–30, 2025, as an opt-in poll promoted on the Go Blog, on social channels including Reddit, Bluesky, Mastodon and X, and inside VS Code and GoLand. It kept 5,379 of 7,070 responses after removing bots and low-quality entries.
| Respondent attribute | Share of respondents |
|---|---|
| Professional developers | 87% |
| Use Go in their primary job | 82% |
| Six or more years of professional experience | 75% |
| Aged 25 to 45 | 68% |
| Work in the “Technology” industry | 46% |
| Under one year of Go experience | 13% |
Source: Go Developer Survey 2025, September 2025 (n = 5,379)
Fewer respondents were new to Go: 13% had under a year of Go experience, down from 21% in 2024. The Go team suspects a link to industry-wide declines in entry-level software engineering roles.
Most arrive mid-career. 81% have more professional experience than Go experience, and over 80% learned Go after starting work.
What Is Go Used For? Workloads and Deployment Targets
55% of respondents build both CLIs and API services in Go. Over a third build cloud infrastructure tooling, and 11% work with ML models, tools or agents.
On the deployment side, 96% ship to Linux-based systems, including containers. Development happens on macOS for 60% and on Linux for 58%.
AWS leads team deployment environments at 46%, just ahead of company-owned servers at 44%. Embedded devices and IoT rose from 2% to 8%, which the Go team calls the only meaningful deployment-platform change since 2024.
Source: Go Developer Survey 2025, September 2025; multi-select questions
Which Frameworks Dominate Go Language Usage? Gin Leads at 48%
Gin reached 48% of Go-primary respondents in JetBrains’ 2025 data, up from 41% in 2020. Echo follows at 16% and Fiber at 11%.
| Library | Type | Share of Go-primary respondents, 2025 |
|---|---|---|
| Gin | Web framework | 48% |
| Testify | Testing | 27% |
| gomock | Mocking | about 21% |
| gorilla/mux | Router (archived 2023) | 17% |
| Echo | Web framework | 16% |
| chi | Router | about 12% |
| Fiber | Web framework | 11% |
| Beego | Web framework | 4% |
Source: JetBrains State of Developer Ecosystem 2025, Go-primary respondents, collected April–June 2025; multi-select
gorilla/mux still reaches 17%, down from 36% in 2020, despite being archived in 2023. The standard library’s net/http remains the most common routing choice, helped by pattern routing added in Go 1.22.
Framework and stack data across other languages sits in our web coding statistics.
AI Tools in Go Work: 53% Use Them Daily
Adoption splits in two. 53% of Go Developer Survey respondents use AI tools daily when writing Go, while 29% used them only a few times in the past month or not at all.
| AI metric | Share of respondents |
|---|---|
| Use AI tools daily when writing Go | 53% |
| Don’t use AI tools, or used them a few times last month | 29% |
| Use agents as their primary AI mode | 17% |
| Satisfied with AI tools | 55% |
| Very satisfied with AI tools | 13% |
| Name non-functional code as the main AI problem | 53% |
| Not building AI-powered features | 78% |
Source: Go Developer Survey 2025, September 2025
Satisfaction trails the language itself: 13% are very satisfied with AI tools, against 62% very satisfied with Go.
Production AI work is thinner. 78% say they are not building AI-powered features and 66% work on software with no AI functionality; in 2024, 59% said they were not involved in AI feature work.
JetBrains measures regular rather than daily use and finds more than 70% of Go developers use at least one AI assistant, agent or AI editor. Related adoption numbers appear in our vibe coding statistics.
FAQs
How many developers use Go?
JetBrains counts 2.2 million professional developers using Go as their primary language in 2025, and more than 5 million including secondary users. Stack Overflow’s 2025 survey found 16.4% of respondents did extensive Go work.
Is Go still popular in 2026?
Depends on the measure. Go’s Stack Overflow share rose to 16.4% in 2025 and it led Cloudflare’s 2025 API client list at 20%, but TIOBE ranked it 12th in September 2026, down from 8th.
What is Go mostly used for?
CLIs and API services. In the 2025 Go Developer Survey, 55% built both, over a third built cloud infrastructure tooling, and 96% deployed to Linux-based systems, including containers.
Is Go more popular than Rust?
In surveys, yes: Stack Overflow’s 2025 edition put Go at 16.4% and Rust at 14.8%. On TIOBE’s search-based index, Rust ranked 10th (1.34%) and Go 12th (1.10%) in September 2026.
Were Reddit users included in the 2025 Go Developer Survey?
Yes. The Go team invited respondents through the Go Blog, Reddit, Bluesky, Mastodon, X and randomized prompts in VS Code and GoLand. It received 7,070 responses and kept 5,379 after cleaning.
Sources
https://survey.stackoverflow.co/2025/technology
https://go.dev/blog/survey2025
https://blog.cloudflare.com/radar-2025-year-in-review/
https://www.tiobe.com/tiobe-index/
https://commandlinux.com/statistics/go-programming-language-usage
