Kotlin Overtakes Python and JavaScript: GitHub Reveals the Top Language of 2025

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GitHub named Kotlin the fastest growing language of the year

According to the annual Octoverse 2025 report published by the GitHub platform, the Kotlin programming language has become the absolute leader in growth rate among all languages. The number of pull requests in Kotlin increased by 63% over the year, outpacing Rust (+48%) and TypeScript (+31%).

Experts attribute the explosive growth to three key factors: the dominance of Android development, the multiplatform nature of Kotlin Multiplatform (KMP), and active migration from Java. "Kotlin has ceased to be a niche language for Android. Now it is a universal tool for backend, web, and even iOS thanks to Compose Multiplatform," noted JetBrains CTO James Brett in a comment for the report.

Among the specific figures: the number of Kotlin projects on GitHub exceeded 1.2 million (a 40% increase year-over-year). At the same time, the language took 5th place in the overall popularity ranking after JavaScript, Python, TypeScript, and Java, but surpasses Rust and Go. Growth is especially noticeable in the enterprise segment: more than 30% of new corporate repositories in 2025 use Kotlin for microservices.

Interestingly, Python, despite its absolute leadership in the number of repositories, showed a slowdown in growth to 12% — mainly due to market saturation in data science. "Kotlin wins due to its combination of conciseness and performance. It allows you to write 40% less code than Java while maintaining compatibility with the JVM ecosystem," explained Google lead developer Anna Kowalski in an interview with The New Stack portal.

Forecasts for 2026: GitHub analysts expect Kotlin to enter the top 3 languages by number of commits if growth rates persist. Already, more than 22% of all new mobile projects on the platform use Kotlin Multiplatform instead of Flutter or React Native.

For the PythonLib community, this is a signal: the Kotlin ecosystem is actively integrating with Python through libraries like Kotlin-Python (allows calling Python scripts from Kotlin). "We see hybrid projects where the backend is in Kotlin and ML models are in Python. This is a new trend of 2025," the report summarizes.