One of the aspects we take in account when picking a language for a project is the popularity of the language. It has some indication regarding the availability of programmers and the availability of 3rd party packages. I looked at the number on GitHub topics for some clue.
| Language | repositories | followers |
|---|---|---|
| Rust | 54,558 | 38,800 |
| Ada | 706 | 72 |
| C | 61,456 | 110,000 |
| C++ | 67,312 | 124,000 |
| Go | 58,155 | 61,000 |
| Golang | 91,210 | 61,000 |
| Java | 232,184 | 153,000 |
| JavaScript | 511,622 | 170,000 |
| Kotlin | 49,809 | 33,500 |
| Perl | 4,450 | 8,700 |
| PHP | 115,931 | 53,800 |
| Python | 428,293 | 285,000 |
| Ruby | 34,901 | 21,100 |
The number of projects tagged on GitHub by a language can have some indication on the popularity, but it also has some serious issues.
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There are two popular tags used for Go/Golang, so I included both.
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Perl: CPAN rocks indicate that there are about 40,000 distributions (libraries, crates, if you wish), 9,276 that is 23.3% indicate that they have GitHub repository. Despite this we only see 4.450 tagged as Perl.
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Python: PyDigger indicates that roughtly 63.13% of the packages indicate that they have GitHub repository. PyPi reports a total of 522,170. That would mean about 330,000 Python projects on GitHub while 428,000 are tagged as Python.
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Rust: Rust digger indicates there are a total of 132,501 crates. Out that 100,013 (75.48%) indicate their repository on GitHub. However, on GitHub only 54,558 actually have been tagged as Rust.
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C++: vcpkg the largest registtry of C++ libraries has only 2,396 libraries while there are 67,312 tagged as C++ on GitHub.
