What can 40 million developers do in 365 days?
Just a few days ago, GitHub, the world’s largest developer community, released its 2019 annual report, revealing that it now has more than 40 million developers worldwide, 80% of whom are from outside the United States.
Last year alone, 10 million new developers joined GitHub, 44% more users created their first project than in 2018, and 1.3 million developers made their first contribution to open source. There are even contributions from new places like the Antarctic.
Forty million developers built a total of 44 million repositories last year, and code repositories on topics like “deep learning,” “natural language processing,” and “machine learning” have grown in popularity over the past year. GitHub passed the 100 million warehouse milestone in November 2018.
Microsoft’s Visual Studio Code or VSCode (19.1k), Azure Docs (14K), and Flutter (13K) were the most contributed open source projects on GitHub last year. It was followed by Google’s TensorFlow (9.9K), Kubernetes (6.9K) and The React Native framework created by Facebook.
JavaScript remains the most popular language used by developers on GitHub, but Python has beaten Java to become the second most used programming language for the first time in GitHub’s history.
The fastest-growing language last year was Dart, the programming language for Google’s UI toolkit, Flutter; Rust, HCL, Kotlin, and TypeScript follow.
In addition, over the past three years, the use of The Notebooks of Jupyter (based on the number of warehouses with Jupyter as the primary language) has increased by more than 100% year-over-year.
TensorFlow’s growth has been even more dramatic: The number of contributors to TensorFlow has grown from 2,238 to 25,166, making it a global community.
Let’s take a look at the detailed report.
In the past year, 10 million new developers joined the GitHub community, contributing to 44 million open source projects worldwide. And nearly 80 percent of GitHub’s users are from outside the United States.
The open source world is built by a global team of maintainers, developers, researchers, designers, writers, and more. On average, each open source project on GitHub welcomed contributors from 41 different countries and regions this year. Since 2014, more open source sources from outside the United States have been growing.
This year, China, India and Germany followed the United States in accelerating open source adoption. Among them, Chinese developers Fork and Clone saw a 48% increase in projects compared to last year.
Top 20 Regions for Open Source Use (excluding the US)
As the developer community grows in Asia and Africa, open source is becoming more global. From Anguilla to Antarctica, we are also seeing unprecedented contributions.
In terms of growth, Open source projects created by Iranian developers in public repositories grew second fastest, and GitHub hopes to make GitHub more accessible in the region in the future.
Hong Kong, Singapore and Japan saw the biggest increases in the number of contributors to open source projects this year, with The Hong Kong Special Administrative Region growing by 101 per cent, 24 per cent faster than Singapore in second place.
In addition to open source, the Developer community in Asia grew rapidly in 2019 in terms of both public and private contributions. Thirty-one percent of Asian contributors are from China, and the number of African developers is also rising significantly.
Since 2014, the number of developers outside the US has been on the rise, with the annual growth rate of the Asian contributor community outpacing that of Europe and North America.
GitHub launched its free private repository in 2019, and so far, it has had a global impact, even in Antarctica. Since its launch in January 2019, the chart shows that 80% of free private repositories have been created outside the US. Asia accounted for 36% of the total, mostly by developers in India, China and Japan.
Here are the regions with the fastest growth in contributors on GitHub, with Hong Kong, China, topping the list for the second year in a row, and Japan continuing to climb.
Top 10 Regions by Contributor (This list is limited to countries and territories with at least 20,000 contributors in 2019)
TensorFlow brings together 25,000 contributors to connect larger Software community with Open Source projects Millions of developers on Github form an increasingly connected community of software. A single package can support millions of other projects, so we can better see how communities are interconnected.
On average, more than 3.6 million repositories rely on the top 50 open source projects, and projects like Rails/Rails, Facebook/Jest, and Axios/Axios are also used by millions of other repositories. The 203 package dependencies support all public and private repositories with enabled dependency diagrams. The average open source project has 180 package dependencies, but this number can range from a few packages to more than 1,000.
This year 350,000 people contributed more than $5 million (in order of stars) to the top 1,000 projects. 1.3 million developers joined the open source community for the first time and made their first contributions to open source projects.
The top 50 open source packages in each language ecosystem (JavaScript, Python, Ruby, etc.) have numerous dependencies. For example, popular NPM packages can be a dependency on millions of other repositories, even though on average there are fewer than 40 direct contributors per package.
The ten most heavily dependent open source software packages, with over four million repositories depending on LoDash/LoDash, ExpressJS/Express, and VisionMedia/Debug, respectively.
TensorFlow brings together 25,000 contributors to connect the larger software community with open source projects
As one of GitHub’s most popular projects, TensorFlow can show us how open source projects can connect with the larger software community. The average number of community contributors to repositories that rely on Python packages is about 190 million. TensorFlow’s community is no exception. Thousands of people have contributed to its dependencies, such as Numpy, Pytest, etc.
Last year, 9,900 contributors contributed to TensorFlow, pull requests, open issues, and more. More than 2,200 developers have contributed directly to TensorFlow. 25,000 community contributors have contributed to tensorFlow-related projects. There are now 46,000 dependency repositories that depend on TensorFlow, on top of the project dependency network.
(Contributions include, but are not limited to, creating pull requests, asking questions, or making submissions)
The community worked together to defuse 7.6 million security alerts
Code reuse can help everyone build software faster than ever, but it also puts developers at risk of distributing security vulnerabilities from their dependencies. When potential vulnerabilities are discovered, we see maintainers, developers, researchers, and an ecosystem of tools working together to ensure code security.
Developers, maintainers and security researchers in the community have defused 7.6 million security alerts this year. Since its release in May 2019, 209,000 autofixes have been consolidated into the GitHub repository through pull requests made through Dependabot.
Projects on GitHub range from redesigning robots to detecting diseases. One trend the report found, however, was that whether developers were testing games or training algorithms, they were more productive this year than ever before.
Here are the most popular projects of 2019, as well as the most popular and fastest-growing programming languages and tools.
The number of new open source projects on GitHub this year reached 44 million, accounting for 30% of all GitHub repositories.
TOP 10 Open source projects with the most contributors
This year, the most popular open source projects had more than 10,000 contributors. Two of them have been on the list since 2016, Microsoft /vscode and ansible/ansible.
New to this list in 2019 are Flutter/Flutter, firstcontributions/first-contributions, and home-assistant/home-assistant.
TOP 10 Open source projects with fastest contributor growth
Toolkits and frameworks for building applications and websites across languages and platforms have seen rapid growth this year. Since the release of version 1.0 in December 2018, Flutter/Flutter is the second fastest growing.
New projects worth watching
There are some that are notable, though not the fastest growing. Include:
TrillCyborg/ Fullstack A full-stack sample for users to learn something cool or build your next application. Jesseduffield/lazydockerdocker and docker – compose a simple terminal UI, PracticalAI /practicalAI uses machine learning to gain valuable insights from data pomber/ Git-history A way to quickly browse the history of files in any Git repository TOP 10 Most popular programming languages
This year, developers are using more than 370 major languages on GitHub.
The most used programming language of the year continues to be JavaScript, which holds the no. 1 spot for the sixth consecutive year!
New to the list this year are C# and Shell. And, for the first time, Python has surpassed Java as the second most used programming language on GitHub.
TOP 10 Fastest-growing programming languages
With Flutter entering the GitHub Trend library, it’s no surprise Dart picked up more contributors this year.
The report also found that the community of statically typed languages for type safety and interoperability: Rust, Kotlin, and TypeScript continues to grow rapidly.
Notebooks of Jupyter increased by over 100%
How to tell if data science is growing fast on GitHub? During the last three years, the use of The Notebooks of Jupyter (based on the number of warehouses with Jupyter as the primary language) has increased by more than 100% year-over-year.
NLP is growing rapidly
Natural language processing (NLP) is also growing rapidly on GitHub, partly because software packages like NTLK have lowered the barriers to entry.
Finally, as you can see from this year’s global trends, hot projects, and most popular programming languages, software is evolving fast. The 30-year-old language is looking for new applications, the new framework is getting thousands of contributors, and people are submitting everything from Python packages to academic papers from all over the world.
With more ways to manage, integrate, and support new workflows — through applications, GitHub Actions, and more — we can’t wait to see how the next steps in building software evolve.
Thanks to the 40 million developers who came together in 2019 to contribute open source, whether for work or play, to make software more accessible, more secure, and more connected than ever before. The code, communities, tools, and technologies you create will propel our world forward in the years ahead.
Full report address:
octoverse.github.com/