Infrastructure-as-code (IaC) is picking up steam, with developers leveraging the Hashicorp Configuration Language (HCL), Shell, and Go language (Golang) heavily this year, according to GitHub’s State of the Octoverse report for 2022. The annual report explores software development across GitHub's code-sharing repositories.
The popularity of these tools points out the growing presence of operations communities in the open source realm. Open source has historically been more centered on developers, says the GitHub report, released on November 9. In fact, HCL was the fastest-growing language on GitHub at 56.1%; this growth was driven by the popularity of the Terraform tool for IaC. The report cites IaC momentum as one of several trends.
Another notable trend is the presence of commercially backed open source projects on GitHub. The most successful projects have salaried developers making regular contributions. First-time open source contributors also tended to favor commercially backed projects. Flutter, Next.js, and Visual Studio Code are all examples of company projects that have become an integral part of GitHub’s developer ecosystem. GitHub also found that 30% of Fortune 100 companies have open source program offices and 50% of first-time contributors work on commercially backed projects.
Overall, GitHub cited the following usage numbers on its platform:
- JavaScript remained the most-used language on GitHub. PHP use declined while Python use increased by 22.5% in 2022. Python was the second-most-used language, followed by Java and TypeScript.
- 94 million developers are using GitHub.
- The Rust community grew by more than 50%.
- More than 90% of companies use open source.
- 90% of Fortune 100 companies use GitHub.
- There were 413 million open source contributions in 2022.
- More than 20.5 million people joined the site this year, with India having the largest developer population growth.
When the first Octoverse report was released 10 years ago, GitHub reported there were 2.8 million individuals using the site.