
Stack Overflow has published its 2024 developer survey, showing little change in programming language popularity despite calls for a move away from unsafe languages. There is evidence, though, that devs are increasingly using PostgreSQL versus MySQL, both open source database managers.
The US government, among others, has asked developers to reduce dependence on unsafe languages such as C and C++, in favour of safer languages such as Rust; yet Rust usage has decreased from 13.5 to 12.6 percent if you believe the survey. Both C and C++ show slight increases. Python is a little up, from 49.28 percent to 51 percent.

These small changes may not be anything more than noise, considering that the exact mix of developers responding will be different from year to year. There is no sign yet though of a mass migration from C or C++ to something else. Note also that percentages here as elsewhere sum to more than 100, since developers are asked to state all the languages they use, and it is possible that changing usage patterns are disguised, if for example a developer switches to Rust for new projects, but still maintains legacy applications in unsafe languages.
In the “other tools” section of the survey it is worth watching Bun, a relatively recent arrival among JavaScript/TypeScript runtime and bundling tools, with usage up grom 0.77 percent in 2023 to 3.8 percent this year, still small but with spectacular growth. Competitor Deno, which oddly lives in in a different section called Web frameworks, has declined from 2.36 percent to 1.9 percent. Node.js remains the popular choice, though slightly down from 42.65 percent to 40.8 percent.
In database managers, it may be significant that PostgreSQL is up from 45.55 percent to 48.7 percent, and MySQL down slightly, to 40.3 percent. A possible reason is not only the high quality of PostgreSQL, but also that MySQL may be suffering under Oracle’s stewardship, which some new features reserved for the paid-for Heatwave variant. PostgreSQL also scores well on the survey’s “desired” metric, meaning developers who want to continue using it, at 74.5 percent versus MySQL’s 52.5 percent. SQLite is gaining popularity, the survey suggests, up from 30.9 percent to 33.1 percent.
Over in cloud platforms, there is also evidence that Vercel, home of Next.js, is winning more developers than its rival Netlify. Vercel has moved from 10.68 percent to 11.9 percent; Netlify is down from 8.95 percent to 7 percent.
Is there any sign of Microsoft losing its commanding share of the IDE (Integrated Development Environment) and programming editor market? Not here; the figures are almost static year on year, with Visual Studio Code top by a huge margin, at 73.6 percent, and Visual Studio second with 29.3 percent.
In AI code assistants though, there is substantial movement. Top of the usage list is ChatGPT (82.1 percent), perhaps because it has a free option, whereas GitHub Copilot is in second place with 41.2 percent, down from 54.77 percent last year. Google Gemini, which also has a free option, is third at 23.9 percent. Codeium has a strong showing, up from 1.25 percent to 6.1 percent. AWS CodeWhisperer usage has declined though, 5.14 percent last year and just 2.6 percent for its successor Amazon Q this time around. Old favourite Tabnine is down from 12.88 percent to 5 percent – despite its president and CMO Peter Guagenti assuring us that it had “held its own as a solid number two” – though we note that developer surveys are not a reliable guide to market share.
Are professional developers happy in their current job? Only 20.2 percent said they were; but a further 47.7 percent said things were OK, or in the strange terminology used by the survey, “complacent,” while 32.1 percent indicated they were not happy. Unfortunately this question was not asked last year.
Despite its size, there are frustrations with the Stack Overflow survey. The categorizations can be perplexing, and the questions change year to year making comparisons difficult.
The survey is always worth attention though because of its reach. The 2024 survey is based on responses from 65,437 respondents, lower than the 2023 figure of 89,184, perhaps reflecting declining traffic to the site as a consequence of AI coding assistants. It remains a high number. 76.7 percent of participants described themselves as professional developers, and 5.9% as “learning to code.”