News

JavaScript Dominated Open Source in 2018

• By David Ramel
• December 20, 2018

GitHub has sliced and diced the data from its annual Octoverse report on open source activity in a variety of ways, and any way you cut it, one overwhelming theme emerges: JavaScript rules.

GitHub earlier reported JavaScript, Java and Python were the dominant programming languages used on its developer platform used by 31 million coders, and followed that up with an examination of what makes a programming language popular, stating "Today, there are more repositories created in JavaScript than in any other language."

Now GitHub is out with a new study of new open source projects introduced in 2018 (technically Dec. 10, 2017 to Dec. 9, 2018). Part of the new report examined non-language topics showing the biggest increase in number of open source projects created in 2018 compared to 2017, again finding a strong JavaScript connection, coming up with this topics list:

1. nodejs
2. react
3. dotnet
4. docker
5. android
6. machine-learning
7. api
8. ios
9. cli
10. vue

"In our programming languages post, JavaScript was the most popular language for new projects, and we see nodejs, react, and vue in the top topics for 2018 -- all tools for developing in JavaScript," GitHub said in a post last week (Dec. 13) about the above list.

In non-JavaScript observations, GitHub highlighted No. 3, dotnet, which "shows that more open source projects are developing apps for Windows," and No. 6, machine-learning, which "is gaining momentum."

The new study also ranked new projects open sourced in 2018 according to the number of stars received in the first 28 days being public and by the number of unique contributors in the first 28 days being public.

That resulted in these two charts:

In the former, JavaScript makes yet another appearance, in the project trekhleb/javascript-algorithms, whose description reads: "This repository contains JavaScript based examples of many popular algorithms and data structures." Other offerings are also related to JavaScript, such as the denoland/deno project for developing in TypeScript.

In yet another view of its Octoverse data, GitHub last month examined breaks and holidays. For once, the term "JavaScript" doesn't even appear in that study.