Octoverse is the annual survey that GitHub conducts among its developers to take the pulse of the community. The most significant highlights from this year’s edition include that Asia is the continent where the most new repositories were created in 2018; the ranking of the most used languages does not show changes among the top 6 languages; and in regard to organizations contributing to open source projects, Microsoft has the lead with 7700 contributions.
Countries and contributions
The ranking of the countries with most GitHub users shows no major variations with respect to last year’s Octoverse, with the US ranking in first with about 20% of the overall community, followed by China, India, the UK, Germany, and Canada. Among the countries that improve their ranking are Japan, which comes in #8 from #9; Spain, #12 from #14; and Hong Kong, #17.
Asia is the continent where the most new repositories were created in 2018, with the number of open source repositories created there exceeding those created in the rest of the world as of September 30, 2018. The countries where the number of contributors has been growing faster are Hong Kong (1.8x), Singapore (1.8x), Egypt (1.6x), Nigeria (1.6x), and Bangladesh (1.6x). While it is true that the largest group of developers is based in the US, 2018 confirmed the growing trend for contributions from outside the US.
The distribution of hourly contributions in private, public, and open source repositories does not show many surprises, with open source and public contributions rising late in the evening and at the weekend, while private contributions prevail during the daytime and on weekdays.
Languages and projects
The ranking of the most used languages does not show changes among the top 6 languages, which include JavaScript, Java, Python, PHP, C++, and C#. Among the top languages that moved up or down in the ranking, TypeScript grows and moves to #7 from #10 last year, while C and Ruby both lose ground relatively to the rest of languages.
The three fastest growing languages are Kotlin (2.6x), HCL (2.2x), and TypeScript (1.9x). The increase is usage of Rust (1.7x) and Go (1.5x) confirm a tendency towards the use of more statically typed languages that focus on thread safety. Only Python shows a significant growth (1.5x) of the top 5 languages.
The projects with the most contributors are Visual Studio Code (19k), React Native (10k), and TensorFlow (9.3k). In regard to contributor growth, Azure Docs, PyTorch, and Godot, a game engine, are the fastest growing projects.
In regard to organizations contributing to open source projects, Microsoft has the lead with 7700 contributions, followed by Google with 5500, and RedHat with 3300. The three universities with the most contributions are UC Berkeley, the University of Washington, and the MIT.
Overall, GitHub adoption has been growing year to year, reaching more than 31 millions developers taht use 96+ millions of GitHub repositories across 2.1+ millions organizations. The growth in terms of new users in 2018 has been staggering, with more new users joining the platform last year than in the previous six year combined. Similarly, the number of organization grew by 40% in 2018. The total number of pull request created throughout GitHub’s life reached 200 millions, a third of which were created in 2018.
GitHub Octoverse 2018 contains more data and insights, so make sure you head to the official web site for all the details.