GitHub is one of the leading AI-powered developer platforms in the world. The Microsoft subsidiary is a software development platform where developers can create, manage, share, and store code. It was launched in 2009 in the U.S. and is used by developers across the globe.

GitHub is incredibly popular, with approximately 100 million developers using it in countries ranging from the United States to France and Indonesia. Its statistics and trends show that it will continue to be a force in the software development world, with ever-growing numbers of users and contributors. It is popular with big tech companies, which use the platform to host and develop their open-source software projects.

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What Is GitHub?

GitHub is a software development platform that uses artificial intelligence (AI) to allow developers to create, store, manage, and share code. Its primary purpose is to make it easier to track issues and facilitate version control when developing software. It uses labels, responsibility assignments, milestones, and search engines for issue tracking, while users can perform pull requests for version control.

It is based on Git software. GitHub offers Git plus access control, software feature requests, task management, bug tracking, continuous integration, and wikis for every project. It supports several features, including documentation, GitHub Codespaces, graphs, email notifications, and more.

GitHub is often used to host open-source software development projects. GitHub projects can be accessed and managed using the Git command-line interface. Anyone can browse public repositories, but only registered users can contribute to these repositories. Users can also install desktop clients and Git plugins. The site offers many networking functions, including discussions, contributions, and code change reviews.

Based in California, GitHub was founded in 2007 and launched in 2009. In 2018, it became a Microsoft subsidiary. The company acquired GitHub after becoming a major platform user to host open-source projects and tools like MSBuild, Windows Calculator, and .NET Core.

GitHub Stats & Trends

GitHub is one of the most popular platforms in the world for storing and sharing code. With GitHub, developers from anywhere in the world can create code repositories and collaborate on code for open-source projects. 

GitHub Usage Statistics

GitHub statistics demonstrate just how in-demand the platform is for software developers. As of January 2023, there are more than 100 million developers worldwide. Most of these developers were based in the United States, followed by India, China, and Brazil.

Outside of the United States, GitHub’s popularity is growing considerably. Between 2021 and 2022, the GitHub developer community in the following countries has seen massive spikes: 

While the United States remains a dominant force, GitHub predicts that if trends continue, then Indian users will match the United States GitHub community by 2025. Of course, total users and activity levels can differ. The total public contributions for the top 1,000 users on GitHub by country can be found in the table below.

The platform has seen continued growth, with 20.5 million new developers joining GitHub in 2022 alone. These developers contributed to 85.7 million repositories, with 3.5 billion total contributions to all projects on GitHub.

The Most Popular Coding Languages On GitHub

Developers on GitHub use a variety of programming languages. JavaScript is the most used language, but developers used more than 500 primary languages to build software in 2023.  The top 15 languages by pull request in 2023 were as follows:

In addition, the Hashicorp Configuration Language (HCL), Rust, Go, and Shell all saw big leaps in usage across the platform.

Most Popular Open-Source Projects

One of the best features of GitHub is the ability for developers to contribute to open-source projects. The top open-source projects, based on the number of contributors, were mostly commercially based efforts:
 

However, one of the fastest-growing projects in terms of contributors - home-assistant/core - is an independent project. This demonstrates the growing interest in home automation. Other top-growing projects include:

Notably, many first-time developers participated in these open-source projects as well as more established users. The most popular projects for new users included: