Google’s Go language, or Golang, has achieved a remarkable feat: it has climbed to the eighth spot in the Tiobe index of programming language popularity after being absent from the top 10 for almost six years. The last time Go was in the top 10 was in July 2017, when it ranked ninth. What explains this resurgence of Go, and what makes it a compelling choice for developers today?

Go was first announced by Google in November 2009 as a language that aimed to combine the simplicity and readability of Python with the performance and concurrency of C++. It quickly gained attention and popularity, winning the Tiobe Language of the Year award 2009. However, the hype faded, and Go dropped to 122nd in the Tiobe index in 2015.

The Tiobe index measures the popularity of programming languages through a formula that evaluates the number of skilled engineers, courses, and third-party vendors for each language based on searches of Google, Bing, Wikipedia, and other websites.

But Go did not give up. It adopted a strict release cycle every six months, backed by Google’s support and resources. It also improved its features and syntax, making the language more expressive and powerful. Go also benefited from the rise of cloud computing and containerization. Go is preferred for building scalable, distributed, and microservice-based applications.

Today, Go is used in many software domains, such as web development, Cloud & Network Services, Command-line Interfaces (CLIs), and Development Operations & Site Reliability Engineering. It has a large and active community of developers contributing to its open-source ecosystem and libraries. It also has a reputation for being fast, reliable, and easy to learn and use. According to the Tiobe index, Go has a rating of 1.73%, which means it is used by 1.73% of all software engineers worldwide.

Go’s rise in the Tiobe index is a testament to its resilience and relevance in the modern programming world. It shows that Go has overcome its initial challenges and established itself as a viable and valuable language for many use cases. Go is here to stay, and it might even surpass some of the big four languages (Python, C, C++, and Java) in the near future.