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Swift — the new king of growth: what GitHub statistics showed for 2023
The GitHub platform published its annual Octoverse 2023 report, and the main surprise was the leadership of the Swift language. According to the report, Swift showed the highest growth rate among all programming languages — the number of active contributors writing in Swift increased by 42% compared to 2022. This allowed Swift to enter the top 10 languages by the number of unique developers on the platform, surpassing languages such as Rust, Kotlin, and Go.
Experts attribute this surge to several factors. Firstly, Swift is actively expanding beyond the Apple ecosystem: in 2023, stable versions of Swift for server platforms (Swift on Server) and support for Windows and Linux appeared. Secondly, the popularity of the SwiftUI framework, which simplifies creating interfaces for iOS, macOS, watchOS, and tvOS, is growing. "Swift has ceased to be just a language for mobile development," comments Anna Krylova, an iOS developer and author of a Swift course. "Now it is used to write backend, parse data, and even create CLI utilities. GitHub clearly confirms this with numbers."
Notably, Swift even outpaced Python in growth rate, which traditionally leads in Data Science and machine learning. Python grew by 28%, but Swift with its 42% became the absolute record holder. The GitHub report also emphasizes that Swift is one of the most "friendly" languages for beginners: the community actively creates educational materials, and the compiler produces clear errors, which lowers the entry barrier.
At the same time, analysts note that the absolute number of projects in Swift still lags behind JavaScript, Python, or TypeScript. However, the growth dynamics suggest that already in 2024–2025, Swift could enter the top five most popular languages on GitHub. "If Apple continues to invest in cross-platform capabilities and server solutions, Swift will become a universal tool," believes Ilya Morozov, technical director of the mobile development studio DigitalKit. "Right now we are seeing only the beginning of this journey."
Recall that Swift was introduced by Apple in 2014 as a replacement for Objective-C. Over nine years, the language has gone from a niche solution for iOS to a full-fledged general-purpose language. The GitHub report for 2023 is the best confirmation of this evolution.
