The global developer population has increased by more than 2.5M since the beginning of 2021. Out of those 26.8M, two in three are below 35 years of age.

We can expect that the developer population will more than double in the next decade to about 45M in 2030.

4M developers joined the JavaScript community in the last year -by far the highest growth in absolute terms across all languages. Even in software sectors where JavaScript is not among developers’ top choices, like data science or embedded development, about a fourth of developers use it in their projects.

Since it surpassed Java in popularity at the beginning of 2020, Python has remained the second most widely adopted language behind JavaScript. Python now counts 11.3M users after adding 2.3M net new developers in the past 12 months. That’s a 25% growth rate, one of the highest across all the large programming language communities of more than 7M users. The rise of data science and machine learning (ML) is a clear factor in Python’s popularity. More than 70% of ML developers and data scientists report using Python.

The group of major, well-established languages is completed with C/C++ (7.5M), PHP (7.3M), and C# (7.1M). Of these, PHP has grown the fastest in the past six months, with an influx of 1M net new developers between Q1 and Q3 2021. As a result, it regained its lead over C#, which added a smaller number of new users during the same period (0.6M).

Rust has formed a very strong community of developers who care about performance, memory safety, and security. As a result, it grew faster than any other language in the last 24 months, nearly tripling in size from just 0.4M developers in Q3 2019 to 1.1M in Q3 2021. According to our data, Rust is mostly used in embedded software projects but also in AR/VR development, most commonly for implementing the low-level core logic of AR/VR applications.

The more niche languages -Go, Ruby, Dart, and Lua- are still much smaller, with up to 2M active software developers each. Go and Ruby are important languages in backend development, but Go has grown slightly faster in the past year, both in absolute and percentage terms. Dart has also seen a significant uptick in its adoption in the last year, fuelled predominantly by the increasing adoption of the Flutter framework in mobile development. Finally, Lua was the second fastest growing language community in the past two years, behind Rust, mainly attracting AR/VR and IoT developers looking for a scripting alternative to low-level languages such as C and C++.

Around half of developers say they are working on, learning about, or interested in each of these technologies.

This is partly because the COVID-19 pandemic has dramatically extended our need for new ways for people to remain connected -augmented and virtual environments can play a significant role in this. In addition, the high bandwidth and low latency of 5G are helping to shape the future of AR/VR as a tool for real-time interaction at scale and providing new opportunities for improved direct-to-device streaming.