Google’s Go language has re-entered the top 10 of the Tiobe index of programming language popularity, after a nearly six-year absence.

Go ranks 10th in the March edition of the index, after placing 11th the previous month. The language last appeared in the top 10 in July 2017. The re-emergence of Go in the March 2023 index is being attributed to its popularity with software engineers and its strength in combining the right features, namely built-in concurrency, garbage collection, static typing, and good performance.

Google’s backing also helps, improving long-term trust in the language, Tiobe said. Go language is perhaps best known for its use in the development of the Docker container system and Kubernetes container orchestration system.

Whether Go stays in the top 10 remains to be seen, with the top 10 position in the index changing almost every month, Tiobe said. Go’s last appearance in the top 10 occurred after an adjustment in how the index was calculated. Tiobe in the summer of 2016 began searching on both the terms “Go” and “Golang” for the language, instead of just the latter. This caused a considerable uptick.

Tiobe index ratings are based on the number of skilled engineers world-wide, courses, and third-party vendors associated with each language. The ratings are calculated using popular search engines such as Google, Bing, and Yahoo.

The Tiobe index top 10 languages for March 2023:

1. Python, 14.83%
2. C, 14.73%
3. Java, 13.56%
4. C++, 13.29%
5. C#, 7.17%
6. Visual Basic, 4.75
7. JavaScript, 2.17%
8. SQL, 1.95%
9. PHP, 1.61%
10. Go, 1.24%

The alternative PyPL Popularity of Programming Language index assesses popularity by analyzing how often language tutorials are searched in Google.

The PyPL index top 10 languages for March 2023:

1. Python, 27.91%
2. Java, 16.58%
3. JavaScript, 9.67%
4. C/C++, 6.93%
5. C#, 6.88%
6. PHP, 5.19%
7. R, 4.23%
8. TypeScript, 2.81%
9. Swift, 2.28%
10. Objective-C, 2.26%