Go (Golang) Again in the Top of Favorite Languages According to StackOverflow 2024 Survey
The annual StackOverflow developer survey is one of the most authoritative sources of data on sentiments in the IT community. In 2024, the Go (Golang) programming language once again confirmed its status as one of the most loved among developers worldwide, confidently entering the top five of the "Most Loved, Dreaded & Wanted" ranking. Let's figure out the secret of Go's popularity and why it continues to gain momentum.
What did the StackOverflow 2024 survey show?
More than 65,000 developers participated in the survey. Go took an honorable 4th place in the "Most Loved Technologies" category with an impressive approval rating of over 68%. It only lost to Rust, TypeScript, and Python, but surpassed veterans like C++ and Java.
- Loved language: 68.3% of developers using Go want to continue writing in it.
- Wanted language: Go is also in the top 10 languages that developers want to learn in the next year.
- Salaries: The average salary of Go developers remains one of the highest in the industry, making the language attractive for career growth.
Why do developers love Go so much?
Go's success is no accident. This language, created within Google by engineers Robert Griesemer, Rob Pike, and Ken Thompson, solves real pain points of modern development:
- Simplicity and readability. Go is very concise. It has no complex syntax, operator overloading, or class inheritance. A new developer can read someone else's Go code almost effortlessly — this is a huge plus for teamwork.
- Built-in concurrency. Goroutines and channels are Go's "killer features." They allow you to write high-performance multithreaded applications without the headache of locks and mutexes.
- Fast compilation. Go compiles into a single binary file in seconds. This eliminates problems with dependencies and virtual machines — copy the binary to the server and run it.
- Excellent standard library. Go has everything for working with HTTP, JSON, encryption, and files "out of the box." You don't need to include dozens of third-party libraries for a simple web server.
Where is Go used today?
Go has become the primary language for a number of areas:
- Microservices and backend: Docker, Kubernetes, Prometheus — all these legendary projects are written in Go.
- DevOps and cloud technologies: Most of the modern cloud infrastructure (Cloud Native) is built on Go.
- Network applications: Proxies, load balancers, CLI utilities.
- Databases: InfluxDB, CockroachDB, etcd — all of them are written in Go.
Is it worth learning Go in 2025?
Definitely yes. If you are a backend developer and want to reach a new level of salary and demand, Go is an excellent choice. It doesn't try to be a "language for everything" (like Python),