SlashData: Rust sees fastest growth, JavaScript still dominates

According to SlashData’s findings, the JavaScript community grew by an impressive four million users in the past 12 months, solidifying its status as the most widely-used programming language globally.

Here is a breakdown of the size of various programming language communities:

• JavaScript: 25.2 million developers
• Python: 18.2 million developers
• Java: 17.7 million developers
• C++: 11.6 million developers
• C#: 10.2 million developers
• PHP: 9.8 million developers
• C: 6.5 million developers
• Kotlin: 5.6 million developers
• Go: 4.7 million developers
• Swift: 4.6 million developers
• Rust: 4 million developers
• Dart: 2.9 million developers
• Objective-C: 2.7 million developers
• Ruby: 2.5 million developers
• Lua: 1.8 million developers

While JavaScript remains the leader, the report highlights the remarkable growth of the Rust community, which is currently experiencing the fastest expansion among major languages.

Rust – a systems programming language known for its focus on performance, safety, and concurrency – is seeing increasing demand for high-performance and secure applications across various domains, including web development, systems programming, and embedded systems.

By providing accurate estimates of language adoption and community sizes, the report offers valuable insights to help stakeholders make informed decisions about language support, tool development, and resource allocation.

Artificial intelligence

While AI may not have taken over the world just yet, it has certainly dominated discussions about the future of technology and made significant inroads into developers’ workflows. According to the report, a staggering 59% of developers now use AI tools to assist with their work.

The full report delves into the current landscape of developers’ work with AI technologies and explores how this trend impacts their careers. It examines the various ways developers interact with machine learning (ML)/AI models, tools, APIs, and services, highlighting key differences between professional and amateur developers.

Among all developers, 71% are actively working with AI in some capacity, with the use of chatbots for coding assistance being the most popular approach, adopted by 42% of respondents.

The report also investigates the correlation between working with AI and self-perceived promotion opportunities at developers’ current jobs. Additionally, the study takes a closer look at the developers most likely to express an intent to quit or change jobs within the next 12 months, shedding light on potential retention challenges faced by employers in the tech industry.

A full copy of SlashData’s report can be found here (registration required)

(Photo by Kurt Cotoaga on Unsplash)

See also: ‘Impact Engineering’ development approach outperforms Agile

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Tags: AI, artificial intelligence, coding, development, JavaScript, languages, programming, report, research, rust, slashdata, study