Golang just celebrated its ninth anniversary

Saturday was the ninth anniversary of the day when the Go team open-sourced the initial sketch of Golang. On each anniversary they list what has happened over the past year for Go.

Golang adoption indicated in surveys

In 2018 Go users expressed in multiple surveys about their happiness with using Go. Many developers who do not use Golang currently also indicated their intent to learn Go before any other language.

In the Stack Overflow 2018 Developer Survey, Golang was in the top 5 most loved and top 3 most wanted languages. This indicated that developers using Go like it, and developers not using Go want to.

ActiveState’s 2018 Developer Survey had Go topping the charts with 36% of users responding with “Extremely Satisfied” using Go and 61% of the users responded with “Very Satisfied” or better.

While the JetBrains’s 2018 Developer Survey awarded Go the “Most promising language” with 12% of respondents using Go today and 16% with the intention to use Go in the future.

Also in the HackerRank 2018 Developer Survey, 38% developer responses indicated that were intending to learn Go next.

The evolution of the Golang community

The first Go conferences and Go meetups were held five years ago. Since then, there has been major growth in community leadership. Now there are more than 20 Go conferences and over 300 Go-related meetups across the world.

There have also been hundreds of great talks in 2018. The Go code of conduct has been revised to better support inclusivity in the Go community.

Go 2

After five years since Go 1, the Go core team is looking into changes to support the language at scale. A draft design for Go modules was published in August, which included ideas to better support error values, error handling, and generic programming. And the most recent release, Golang 1.11, included preliminary support for modules.