9.75 mn developers in India using GitHub, 2nd largest after US

Bengaluru, Nov 10 (IANS) Software development collaboration platform GitHub has said that 9.75 million developers in India are now using its platform, making the country the second largest developer community on GitHub, behind the US.

More than 2.5 million Indians joined the platform over the past year -- a 35 per cent year-over-year (YoY) increase.

If this user growth continues, GitHub predicts that users in India will match the current US GitHub developer population by 2025.

"India's growing developer community is central to the country's position as an innovation powerhouse, and open source is at the heart of this. India's developers are shaping the future of software and directly influencing global innovation, with the country uniquely positioned to push this even further," said Martin Woodward, VP Developer Relations at GitHub.

"We'll continue to empower developers to build incredible software. After all, there's no limit to what they can create and the impact they'll have on India -- and the world," he added.

This year's GitHub 'State of the Octoverse' report found that more than 94 million developers from across the world are building on the platform, including over 20 million news users in 2022 and 90 per cent of the Fortune 100.

With more than 85.7 million new repositories created in 2022 -- a 20 per cent YoY growth -- and 3.5 billion contributions to all projects on GitHub, the gains in developer productivity had a material impact, the report stated.

"There were 227 million pull requests merged, 31 million issues closed, and 263 million automated jobs run on GitHub Actions every month in 2022," it added.

Developers updated 50 per cent more vulnerable packages compared to 2021 and helped secure 18 million projects.

About 90 per cent of the top open source projects by contributor count were company-backed in 2022, underscoring their importance in growing the open source ecosystem.

"While JavaScript continues to reign supreme, HashiCorp's HCL language saw the biggest YoY increase at 56 per cent, indicating that infrastructure-as-code practices are being adopted across GitHub," said the report.

Python programming language saw a 22.5 per cent increase in large part due to its versatility in everything from education to machine learning and data science.