GitHub Language Trends

Metric

As of

Top 100 languages

Compare vs

Rank	Rank 1y ago	Change	Trend	Language	—	Δ pp

Motivation

Most language popularity indexes are based on search engine queries, tutorial views, or expert opinion. This index is based on actual developer activity on GitHub — real code, real commits, real pull requests. GitHut 2.0 took the same approach, but is no longer maintained. This project picks up where it left off, with up-to-date data.

About this data

Source

Activity data is sourced from GH Archive, which records every public GitHub event. Events are aggregated monthly and filtered to remove bots, CI actors, single-event repositories, and deleted repositories.

Language attribution

Up to and including 2025-09, GitHub's event payloads contained a language field identifying the repository's primary language. Statistics for these months are therefore based on a single language per repository.

From 2025-10 onwards, GitHub stripped language data from event payloads. Language breakdowns are now resolved via the GitHub GraphQL API, which returns the full byte-size breakdown of every language in a repository. Each repository's activity score is then distributed proportionally across all its languages by byte share.

This means the two eras are not perfectly comparable: secondary languages (CSS, HTML, Shell, …) appear more prominently from 2025-10 onwards because they were previously invisible inside mixed-language repositories.

Rating formula

For each repository, the chosen event count is distributed across its languages:

rating[L] += event_count × (size_L / total_size)

The developer-activity metric uses distinct contributors — the union of unique actors from PushEvent and PullRequestEvent — instead of raw event count, making it neutral to per-developer commit-frequency habits.

Alternative indexes

GitHut 2.0 — GitHub language popularity by event type
TIOBE Index — search-engine-based language popularity index
PYPL Index — popularity of programming languages by tutorial searches
RedMonk Rankings — language rankings combining GitHub and Stack Overflow data
GitHut — interactive visualization of programming language activity on GitHub
GitHub Innovation Graph — ranking of programming languages by unique developers per economy and quarter