The Google-built Go language has reached an all time high position in the Tiobe index of programming language popularity, ranking seventh in the November 2024 edition of the index.
While Go already had cracked Tiobe’s top 10, the language had never ranked higher than eighth. “What makes Go unique in the top 10 is that Go programs are fast and easy to deploy while the language is easy to learn,” said Paul Jansen, CEO of software quality services vendor Tiobe. Although the Python language is similarly easy to learn, it is not fast, and deployment for larger Python programs is fragile due to dependencies on all kinds of versioned libraries in the environment, Jansen said. And if compared to the Rust language, Go is a bit slower, but Go programs are much easier to understand, he added. Rust ranks 14th in this month’s index while Python is first overall.
The next hurdle for Go is to surpass JavaScript, which is currently ranked sixth. While JavaScript will be a tough language to pass, considering its ubiquity in software development, Go could do so in three years if trends continue, Jansen said.