Google’s programming language Go saw a huge surge in popularity in the past year.

This popularity is in part thanks to the fact that the language is the foundation of the DevOps and container darling Docker as well as Google’s container orchestration product Kubernetes.

The TIOBE Index for October 2016 shows that Go is one of two languages that showed a more than 1 percent rise in popularity. Go was so popular among surveyed developers that use of the language rose to rank 16 in 2016 up from rank 65 in 2015 with a total change of 1.67 percent. This year’s Go ranking is 1.809 percent, a stratospheric rise from 0.139 percent in October 2015–in summary, Go’s popularity this year is thirteen times larger than last year.

The Index attributes this sudden jump for the language, first released in 2009, to “the immense popularity of Docker, the container application that is written in Go.”

The PYPL (PopularitY of Programming Languages) index, generated by analyzing data of how often programming tutorials are searched for on Google, also shows that interest in Go has risen this year. According to PYPL, Go has risen to rank 18, up by 0.2 percent over 2015.

Although Google Go’s popularity is rising in those two indexes, Redmonk’s 2016 Programming Language Rankings, which uses a correlation between GitHub lines of code and Stack Overflow discussions, saw no change in Go’s rank year-over-year published in June. In fact, a look at the graph shows that after a rise in popularity since 2012, Go’s interest across these two metrics flattened in 2015 to 2016.

In the past two years, Docker has displayed an extremely robust market share as a container system. In 2015, Docker claimed over 1.2 billion pulls (downloads) of its software. Year over year from 2014 to 2015, Docker saw immense growth with a 183 percent increase in contributors, and more than 150,000 applications running on Docker (an increase of 934 percent since 2014). This sets a nice base for developers using Docker to look to the language it’s written in: Google Go.

In a slide presentation published by Docker, the project’s engineers explained that Go simply worked best for the project. First, Go was chosen because it could compile static, meaning it would embed everything needed at compilation (eschewing dependencies), making Docker easier to install, test and adopt. Go also did everything Docker needed it to do: give good asynchronous primitives, low-level interfaces and access to an extensive library of functions and data types.

According to ex-Google engineer Joe Beda, “Go is Goldilocks for systems software,” when answering why Google chose Go for its container orchestration system, Kubernetes. He cited great libraries, fast tools, KISS (Keep It Simple Stupid) culture, excellent extended tools, built in concurrency, anonymous functions, good garbage collection and type safety. Also, Kubernetes was intended to orchestrate Docker, which already ran on Go, so it made an easy, compatible choice.

Featured image credit: Julio Martinez Paduk board in the Korean room via photopin (license)