Although developer sentiment toward the Go language remains very positive, teams face a challenge when it comes to maintaining consistent coding standards across Go code bases, according to Go developer survey results for the second half of 2024. Go developers also have been quick to adopt AI assistants, the survey found.
The survey, conducted from September 9 through September 23, found that 93% of respondents felt satisfied working with Go during the prior year. Maintaining consistent coding standards, though, was a challenge due to team members having different levels of Go experience and coming from different programming backgrounds. This has led to inconsistencies in coding styles and adoption of non-idiomatic patterns.
Published December 20, 2024, the survey covered a total of 4,156 responses, with participants recruited from the Go blog and randomized prompts in the Go plugin for Visual Studio Code and the GoLand IDE. This enabled recruitment of a more representative sample of Go developers, according to the survey report. In other findings in the survey:
70% of respondents were using AI assistants when developing with Go. The most common uses were LLM-based code completion, generating Go code from natural language descriptions, writing tests, and brainstorming. The survey found a significant discrepancy between what respondents said they wanted to use AI for last year and their current use for AI.
Ease of deployment and easy-to-use APIs and SDKs were the favorite things about using Go on the top three cloud providers, with first-class Go support critical to keeping up with developer expectations.
Most survey respondents develop with Go on Linux (61%) and macOS (59%) systems. This is consistent with previous years.
Asked how long they had used Go, 8% of respondents had used the programming language eight-plus years, 23% had used it five to seven years and 30% had used it two to four years.