Go Library

Key findings



- Novice Go developers are interested in web development. We introduced a new segmentation this year based on self-identified experience levels. Novices expressed some interesting differences from other experience levels. Most notably they showed greater interest in using Go for web development.

- Error handling and learning are respondents’ top challenges. Historically, lack of generics was the biggest challenge to using Go, but since the introduction of generics, we’ve seen comments about generics decline. Comments about error handling (with respect to readability and verbosity) and difficulty learning best practices are now the most commonly reported challenges.

- An optimization guide was the most valued way to improve Go’s performance. When asked how they would spend resources on various improvements to Go’s compile and runtime, respondents spent the most on an optimization guide rather than specific performance improvements, demonstrating how much documentation is valued in this area.

- Managing dependencies and versioning are the top challenges for open source Go module maintainers. Open source module maintainers face challenges in keeping their dependencies up to date and avoiding disruptions due to versioning and breaking changes. This is an area we’ll explore further to help maintainers provide a stable and healthy ecosystem.