Since its launch in 2008, GitHub has become the largest project management and open source collaboration platform on the Internet, with 96 million projects and 31 million users as of September 30, up from 24 million last year. Microsoft acquired GitHub in June for $7.5 billion and expects the acquisition to close by the end of the year.

At the annual GitHub Universe conference, GitHub announced the biggest version update ever: it lets everyone run parts of the code directly! GitHub’s platform lead Sam Lambert described the update as “the biggest change in GitHub’s history”.

GitHub used to have a few actions: upload, search, and download. If we want to test a project on GitHub, we have to download it and run it locally. A new product, GitHub Actions, gives programmers a tool to automate code management, including testing and support. Lambert said that some users often write their own bot software to run tests or automatically send SMS notifications when bug reports are submitted, but these tools need to run on a server outside of GitHub. This can now be done on GitHub, which, while not for everyone, allows programmers to develop their own features.

When someone submits code, GitHub Actions can directly use that part of the submitted code as a workflow to perform specific Actions, such as Posting a photo to Twitter. Lambert describes this as a bit like running a code block with “if this then that “logic.

The new service launches in beta today with 450 preset “commands”. In addition to writing your own “instructions,” you can use Docker to bundle existing applications to run on GitHub, which means teams can customize code management tools when new projects start. GitHub has also made some restrictions to prevent GitHub Actions from becoming a public Web server.

The GitHub security system has also been upgraded to provide a Token scanning function. When uploading a project to GitHub, it detects whether the user has uploaded any private information. For example, if information such as a secret key or password is pushed to a public branch, active alerts can alert developers or even cloud providers. Had this function, similar China live group drags storehouse this kind of thing can get effective guard against.

A total of 2.1 million organizations used GitHub this year, up 40 percent from the 1.5 million reported in 2017. About a third of the 96m projects currently hosted were created in the past year.

The US, China and India make up the top three ficolin-producing countries, with China taking second place this year, moving up one spot. Eight million new developers joined GitHub this year, with the us, China and India registering the most. The number of new users in 2018 far exceeds that of the previous six years combined. New ficers were 1.6 times more than in 2017.

But the largest number of code submissions are in Asia, where there are more open source projects than anywhere else.

GitHub is also home to many developer organizations, some companies, some schools, and some nonprofit groups. Below are some of the organizations with the largest number of members.

  1. Microsoft: 7700

  2. Google: 5500

  3. Red Hat: 3300

  4. UC Berkeley: 2700

  5. Intel: 2200

  6. Univ. of Washington: 1800

  7. Facebook: 1700

  8. MIT: 1700

  9. Univ. of Michigan: 1600

  10. Stanford: 1600

Developers working on open source projects tend to be active at night, even at 11 PM. Chinese New Year, as well as May Day, Thanksgiving and Independence Day in the US, when GitHub projects are scaled back, and the quietest time of year is on New Year’s Day (January 1).

GitHub LABS, which was launched earlier this year and allows teachers to assign homework via GitHub, has helped 1.1 million students learn to use GitHub. The survey found that 31 percent of students feel “ready” for the workplace.

Ranked by number of contributors. VS Code, React, and TensorFlow continue to lead the list, while Kubernetes, Azure Documentation, and TypeScript type files are new entries this year.

  1. Microsoft/vscode: Microsoft launched a cross-platform code editor, popular with programmers. Close to 2W contributors

  2. Facebook/React-Native: Facebook’s mobile cross-platform development framework actually hit some bumps in 2018 when Airbnb dumped it after much deliberation. However, the official team has announced that it is undergoing major remodeling, so we are optimistic about its future.

  3. Tensorflow/TensorFlow: Google’s deep learning framework, TensorFlow, has been so successful that it has attracted many programmers to ai research and development, and is expanding to various platforms, such as mobile phones and browsers.

  4. Angular/Angular-CLI: Angular is Google’s front-end framework, one of the top three front-end frameworks, and is its scaffolding tool. Angular scaffolding is extremely powerful, with lots of configuration items and template code, which is one of Angular’s strengths.

  5. MicrosoftDocs/azure docs: Microsoft uses an open source approach to building documentation for its azure cloud platform, an effort that has clearly won over programmers.

  6. Angular/Angular: Front-end framework from Google. React and Vue are no less popular in the community than Angular, but Angular is clearly the most open in terms of the number of contributors.

  7. Ansible/Ansible: An o&M management tool developed by Ansible. It greatly facilitates operation and maintenance automation, is adopted by many well-known companies, and has the advantage of having a strong community.

  8. Kubernetes/Kubernetes: Google container choreography tool. Having won the container choreography war last year, Kubernetes is now at the heart of container technology, driving the rapid growth of cloud native technologies.

  9. NPM/NPM: an old package management tool for Node.js. It is also the package management tool hosting the largest number of third-party libraries, backed by the active JS community, it still has a strong vitality.

  10. DefinitelyTyped/DefinitelyTyped: TypeScript warehouse type declaration documents. Third-party libraries provide better support and development experience in TypeScript by configuring type declaration files.

GitHub counted projects with above-standard growth, and this was the fastest. They found that the fastest growing areas include machine learning, gaming, 3D printing, home automation, scientific programming, data analytics, and JavaScript full-stack development.

  1. MicrosoftDocs/azure-docs: azure open source documents.

  2. Pytorch/PyTorch: Deep learning tensor library optimized with GPU and CPU.

  3. Godotengine/Godot: Cross-platform game engine with 2D and 3D support.

  4. Nuxt/nuxt.js: Vue based Web development framework.

  5. Ethereum/Go-Ethereum: The best-known blockchain platform Ethereum project.

  6. Wix/React-native navigation: React Native navigation component.

  7. Spyder – IDE/Spyder: Python development integration tool for scientific research.

  8. Tensorflow/Models: A model project for Tensorflow.

  9. Home-assistant/Home-Assistant: Open source home automation platform.

  10. MarlinFirmware/Marlin: Arduino-based RepRap 3D printer firmware.

GitHub has selected what it considers innovative new open source projects that have potential for future growth.

  1. Swapping is a framework for rapidly prototyping reinforcement learning algorithms.

  2. Facebookresearch/Detectron: Facebook latest object detection algorithm of artificial intelligence laboratory implementation of open source project.

  3. Frappe/Charts: a responsive JavaScript SVG chart library.

  4. Felixrieseberg /windows95: run a full Windows 95 image in Electron.

  5. Wangshub /wechat_jump_game: A Python assist for wechat’s hop game 😁

The most talked about topics on GitHub in 2018 included JavaScript, machine learning, mobile development, containers, and more.

  1. react

  2. android

  3. nodejs

  4. docker

  5. ios

  6. linux

  7. angular

  8. machine-learning

  9. electron

  10. api

JavaScript reigns at GitHub, no matter public or private projects, any organization, anywhere in the world.

By the way, even TypeScript is in the Top 10, and it’s the fastest-growing programming language in the Top 10.

Among statically typed languages on GitHub, thread-safe and interoperable programming languages Kotlin, TypeScript, and Rust have seen significant growth. HCL is the language used by DevOps and has been growing very fast in the past two years. Python and Go, which shine in machine learning and containers, are also doing well.

  1. Kotlin 2.6 X

  2. 2 HCL 2.2 X

  3. 1.9 X 3 TypeScript

  4. 4 PowerShell 1.7 X

  5. 1.7 X 5 Rust

  6. 6 CMake 1.6 X

  7. 7 Go 1.5 X

  8. 8 Python 1.5 X

  9. 9 Groovy 1.4 X

  10. 10    SQLPL

GitHub has become a necessary platform for programmers to learn, work and communicate. We are glad to see more and more Chinese companies and developers participating in open source. We hope to see more domestic open source projects, organizations and developers showing their talents on the international stage in the future.