The State of Go in 2026

The IDE for professional development in Go

Every year, the JetBrains Developer Ecosystem survey gives us a snapshot of how developers work. This year, 28,945 developers took part between May and July 2026, and 1,836 of them named Go as one of their primary programming languages.

To celebrate Go’s 17th birthday, in this post, we look at who those Gophers are, which tools they rely on, how AI is changing their day-to-day work, and what the most significant events of this year were for the Go community.

Web services are still Go’s home turf: 80% of Go developers use Go for backend web development, and 49% use it to build CLI utilities and small tools. The biggest shift is in full-stack work, which grew from 30% in 2025 to 40% in 2026 – a trend that matches the rise of TypeScript as Go’s favorite companion language (more on that below).

In relative terms, the fastest-growing task is deploying and managing AI models, which doubled from 3% to 6%. It’s still a niche, but the tooling is maturing. Community projects like Ardan Labs’ Kronk, led by Bill Kennedy, bring hardware-accelerated local inference directly into Go applications.

Which tasks do you usually use Go for? (Multiple answers allowed)

Source: JetBrains Developer Ecosystem Surveys 2025–2026, weighted data. Base: 1,420 (2025), 1,529 (2026).

Go developers rarely live in Go alone. Only 46% name Go as their single main language. Among their other primary languages, Python (35%), TypeScript (27%), and Java (22%) are the most common.

This holds true even more so for individual projects. Just 27% of Go developers use no other language alongside Go in the same project, down from 35% in 2024. TypeScript has become Go’s most common project companion, jumping from 24% in 2024 to 43% in 2026 and leaving Python (27%) and JavaScript (24%) far behind. A Go backend with a TypeScript frontend is turning into the default stack for a growing share of teams.

Languages Go developers use alongside Go in the same project

Which languages do you use along with Go in the same project? (Multiple answers allowed)

Source: JetBrains Developer Ecosystem Surveys 2024–2026, weighted data. Base: 1,012 (2024), 1,398 (2025), 1,520 (2026).

Other primary programming languages of Go developers

What are your primary programming languages? Languages Go developers name alongside Go.

Source: JetBrains Developer Ecosystem Surveys 2024–2026, weighted data. Base: 1,800 (2024), 1,846 (2025), 1,836 (2026). Go developers are respondents who named Go as one of their primary programming languages.

Most Go developers aren’t looking to move: 70% don’t plan to adopt or migrate to another language in the next 12 months, up from 64% in 2024 and higher than the 63% we see across all respondents of the Developer Ecosystem 2026 survey.

Among those who do plan to learn something new, Rust dominates. Chosen by 16% of Go developers, the share has been holding steady for three years now. We see that they don’t just stop at admiring the language; they actively adopt it – the share of Go developers who used Rust in the last 12 months grew from 14% in 2019 to 25% in 2026, so one in four Gophers now has at least some experience with Rust.

That doesn’t mean Go services are being rewritten, though. Rust is the most desired language across the whole survey, and many developers may be using it for side projects or for narrow, performance-critical components.

Languages Go developers plan to adopt or migrate to in the next 12 months

Do you plan to adopt or migrate to other languages in the next 12 months? If so, which ones?

Source: JetBrains Developer Ecosystem Surveys 2024–2026, weighted data. Base: 1,799 (2024), 1,840 (2025), 1,836 (2026). Go developers are respondents who named Go as one of their primary programming languages. Go itself is not shown.

Go isn’t just something developers are forced to use at work. While 82% use Go professionally, 70% also use it for personal or side projects, and 40% use it for hobby projects. When that many developers reach for a language in their free time, it’s a good sign that they actively choose Go rather than merely tolerate it.

Types of projects Go developers use Go for

Which types of projects do you use Go for? (Multiple answers allowed)

Source: JetBrains Developer Ecosystem Survey 2026, weighted data. Base: 1,528.

Go remains a language of experienced engineers. Two-thirds (66%) of Go developers have six or more years of professional coding experience, compared to an average of 49% of all respondents. At the other end of the scale, only 3% have less than a year of professional experience or none at all, compared with 13% overall.

That seniority is reflected by salary bands as well. 17% of Go developers earn more than USD 120,000 a year, compared with 13% of all respondents, and the share earning more than USD 180,000 is almost twice as high (9% vs. 5%).

Years of professional coding experience: Go developers vs. all respondents

How many years of professional coding experience do you have?

4%1%9%2%15%9%22%22%28%22%18%12%20%16%

None<11–23–56–1011–1516+

Years of professional coding experience

Source: JetBrains Developer Ecosystem Survey 2026, weighted data. Base: 1,836 Go developers, 28,945 respondents overall. Go developers are respondents who named Go as one of their primary programming languages.

Annual salary in USD: Go developers vs. all respondents

Annual salary, converted to USD and grouped into bands

15%10%14%11%14%12%11%10%9%9%13%13%17%12%8%8%9%5%

Up to 12K12–24K24–36K36–48K48–60K60–84K84–120K120–180KOver 180K

Annual salary, thousand USD

Source: JetBrains Developer Ecosystem Survey 2026, weighted data. Base: respondents who reported a salary – 1,115 Go developers, 14,823 overall. Go developers are respondents who named Go as one of their primary programming languages.

Go’s standard library has always been one of its strongest selling points, and external frameworks struggle to compete. This year, net/http usage among Go developers rose to 46% (from 32% in 2025), putting it practically level with Gin (48%), which held steady.

Among the other options for web development frameworks, chi (15%), Echo (13%), and Fiber (13%) are the most popular, and only 12% of Go developers don’t use any web framework or router at all.

We can’t measure the reasons directly, but there are a few factors that may contribute to the rising popularity of the standard library’s net/http. Since Go 1.22, the standard ServeMux supports method matching and wildcards in route patterns, which covers much of what developers used to pull in a third-party router for. Meanwhile, the original gorilla/mux, which dominated for a long time but was archived in 2022, is likely slowly being replaced in production projects. Finally, with agentic development on the rise, one of Gin’s primary advantages – handling repetitive tasks – no longer seems relevant, since AI can handle the boilerplate on its own and will favor the standard library to avoid dependency resolution.

Testing frameworks and mock libraries follow a similar stdlib-first pattern: 35% of Go developers don’t use any external frameworks, followed by Testify at 31% and GoMock at 25% – a noticeable rise from 17% in 2024. Interestingly, the share of Go developers who don’t write unit tests dropped to 14% in 2026, from 21% in 2025. This might be because they can now use AI to help with this task; in fact, we see that 84% of Gophers use AI to generate tests weekly or more often – an increase of 20 p.p. compared to 2025!

The starkest contrast is in build systems: 86% of Go developers use go build, while 46% also rely on Makefiles. Other tools (Gradle – 6%, Bazel – 4%) lag far behind.

Go web frameworks Go developers regularly use

Which Go web frameworks do you regularly use, if any? (Multiple answers allowed)

Source: JetBrains Developer Ecosystem Surveys 2025–2026, weighted data. Base: 1,389 (2025), 1,519 (2026).

Build systems Go developers regularly use

Which build systems do you regularly use, if any? (Multiple answers allowed)

Source: JetBrains Developer Ecosystem Surveys 2024–2026, weighted data. Base: 1,008 (2024), 1,393 (2025), 1,518 (2026).

Testing frameworks and mock libraries Go developers regularly use

Which testing frameworks or mock libraries do you regularly use, if any? (Multiple answers allowed)

Source: JetBrains Developer Ecosystem Surveys 2024–2026, weighted data. Base: 1,030 (2024), 1,396 (2025), 1,518 (2026). In 2024 and 2025, the question asked about testing frameworks only; “or mock libraries” was added in 2026.

With the rise of AI, the editor landscape for Go has diversified. GoLand (49%) and VS Code (48%) are each used by about half of Go developers. Zed nearly tripled its share (5% to 14%) in a year, Cursor held steady at 14%, and Neovim edged up to 10% at the expense of Vim.

But we don’t see developers abandoning the IDE. As the AI section below shows, more Go developers say the time they spend in their IDE has increased over the past year than say it has shrunk, and IDE-based coding agents are part of their daily routine. The question is no longer whether developers use an IDE, but how it fits into a workflow that also includes agents running in the terminal and in the cloud.

IDEs and editors Go developers use for Go development

Which IDEs or editors do you use for Go development? (Multiple answers allowed)

Source: JetBrains Developer Ecosystem Surveys 2025–2026, weighted data. Base: 1,425 (2025), 1,529 (2026).

In August, Cameron Balahan and Richard Seroter from Google argued that Go is an ideal language for AI-assisted software engineering. Their case rests on Go’s design for team-based engineering: a single toolchain, enforced formatting, static types, fast compilation, a batteries-included standard library, and a compatibility promise that keeps old code building. All of these give humans and agents fast, deterministic feedback.

Our data can’t tell us whether AI output in Go is actually better than in other languages. What it does show clearly, though, is that Go developers have built AI into their work more deeply than almost anyone else.

Of the 23 AI-assisted tasks we asked about, Go developers report significantly higher weekly usage than the overall developer population for 16 of them, and do not report significantly lower usage for any of them. The biggest gaps are visible in higher-level tasks:

For everyday tasks like code completion (79% for both groups) or generating boilerplate (82% to 80%), Go developers are on par with everyone else.

Weekly AI use for coding tasks at work: Go developers vs. all respondents

How often do you use AI tools for each of the following tasks at work? Share answering once a week or more often.

Source: JetBrains Developer Ecosystem Survey 2026, weighted data. Base: respondents who use AI tools at work and answered each task – about 690–990 Go developers and 9,240–13,050 respondents overall per task. Go developers are respondents who named Go as one of their primary programming languages.

The clearest difference is in how Go developers use AI coding agents. 86% run agents in the CLI or terminal at least once a week, compared with 74% of all respondents, and only 5% never use them (general population – 14%).

Our first guess as to why that happens was seniority – it stands to reason that experienced developers tend to feel more at home in the terminal. But the gap holds when we compare like with like: Among developers with six or more years of experience, 87% of Go developers use CLI agents weekly, compared to 75% of the general population.

A more likely explanation is the nature of Go work itself. Go developers build CLI tools, infrastructure, and services that live in the terminal, so it’s natural for their AI tools to live there too. And the Go toolchain – go build, go vet, go test, go fmt, and go fix – gives terminal agents a fast, predictable feedback loop, which aligns with the point the Go team made.