Go Developer Survey Is Out: What 5,379 Go Developers Actually Want Next

The 2025 Go Developer Survey reveals developers' desire for better best practices, enhanced standard library usage, and modernized tooling. AI-powered development tools are common, yet satisfaction is moderate due to quality concerns. Most respondents are experienced developers in the tech industry, highlighting challenges like ensuring code quality and finding reliable modules.

The 2025 Go Developer Survey is out and it offers a clear snapshot of where the Go ecosystem stands today and where friction remains. Developers broadly value Go as a stable, productive platform, but they are asking for more guidance on best practices, better ways to leverage the standard library, and modernized tooling to reduce day-to-day friction.

AI-powered development tools are now widely used among Go developers, particularly for learning, boilerplate generation, unit tests, and autocompletion. However, satisfaction remains moderate. The dominant concern is code quality: AI-generated output often requires careful review, corrections, and contextual adjustments, which limits trust and caps productivity gains. AI is seen as helpful for reducing toil, not as a reliable autonomous coder.

The survey highlights a recurring usability issue with Go's tooling: core command documentation. A significant number of developers report frequently revisiting documentation for fundamental commands such as go build, go run, and go mod. The current help system is functional but not discoverable or ergonomic enough - this is what the data suggests.

Demographically, respondents are overwhelmingly experienced professional developers, many of whom adopted Go after working extensively in other languages. This creates a recurring challenge: when Go's idioms differ sharply from familiar paradigms, developers struggle to both learn and consistently apply "the Go way." This reinforces the call for more official, opinionated guidance and better tooling support to encode idiomatic practices.

Three challenges dominate developer feedback:

• Difficulty identifying and enforcing best practices.
• Missing language features commonly found elsewhere, particularly around error handling, enums, and expressiveness.
• Trouble identifying trustworthy third-party modules, with developers asking for stronger quality signals, maintenance indicators, and usage context.

On the environment side, Go remains firmly rooted in UNIX-like systems, with macOS and Linux dominating development and Linux-based deployments accounting for nearly all production use. Containers remain the default deployment target, while embedded and IoT usage is growing. VS Code and GoLand continue to lead as preferred editors, and AWS alongside company-owned infrastructure remain the most common deployment environments.

More details available in the official blog post.

• https://go.dev/blog/survey2025...