JetBrains has released its annual State of Developer Ecosystem report, highlighting the trends across software development. This year the report includes a new section called the Language Promise Index, which ranks languages by growth, stability, and adoption willingness.
Across the board since 2017, JavaScript has topped the list, with 61% of users programming in that language. “Once developers choose an ecosystem, they typically don’t plan on adopting any other technology or toolset. As is often the case, people tend to pick what they like and stick with what they know,” JetBrains wrote in the report.
However, TypeScript, Rust, and Python are also showing growth year-over-year, which the company says is a reflection of their versatility and appeal across different domains.
TypeScript has grown from 12% usage in 2017 to 37% in 2024, Python has grown from 32% usage in 2017 to 57% in 2024, and Rust has grown from 2% usage in 2018 (no data from 2017) to 11% in 2024.
According to JetBrains, the benefits TypeScript provides over JavaScript include early error detection during development, improved code quality and easier longer-term maintenance, compile-time error catching, less error-prone refactoring, and native support for ES6 modules.
The report also studied the overall usage of AI in software development, finding that almost 80% of companies allow third-party AI tools or don’t have formal restrictions. This indicates that comfort in AI is growing, the company said.
It also found that 18% of developers have already begun to integrate AI capabilities into their products.
Developer experience has also been gaining traction, with 28% of respondents saying they measure both developer productivity and developer experience.
The majority (67%) say that team leads are responsible for developer productivity and developer experience, while 17% have a Platform Engineering team responsible for that and 16% have other dedicated specialists or teams.
“This topic has been gaining increasing attention lately, as developer experience is closely connected with the effectiveness of software development delivery. Companies are stepping up their efforts to assess DevEx and developer productivity, aiming to better understand the factors that influence them. Developers state that both technical and non-technical factors are almost equally critical in shaping their developer experience,” JetBrains wrote.
Other findings of the report include:
- 8% of developers have experimented with coding in VR
- Scala, Go, Kotlin, and Rust as the highest paying programming languages
- Desktop development is still more common than mobile development.
Read the full report for more insights into the state of the developer ecosystem.