TIOBE November 2026: Rust Falls Out of Top 10, Dart Enters Top 20 for First Time

The monthly TIOBE index serves as a mirror reflecting the rise and fall of industry popularity and ecosystem fortunes. The latest November 2026 rankings have been released, showing a stable top tier but intense competition near the top‑10 boundary, with language movements revealing shifting demand across development sectors.

Top Tier Stable with Shifts: Java Overtakes C++

Python remains at #1 with a 20.86% rating, down 2.51 percentage points year‑over‑year but still far ahead. C holds #2 at 11.48%, up 1.80 points, buoyed by steady demand in systems, embedded, and OS development. A notable change occurs at #3 and #4: Java rises to 8.89%, overtaking C++ at 8.35%. The gap is only 0.54 points, so positions could flip again. C# and JavaScript sit at #5 and #6, but both show declining ratings compared to a year ago (‑4.26% and ‑1% respectively).

Rust Falls to 11th, Not Due to Cooling but Intense Competition

Rust drops to #11 with a 1.63% rating, while Go takes #10 at 1.69%. However, Rust’s rating is actually up 0.25 points from a year ago, and its rank has improved from #14 to #11. The slide out of the top 10 reflects extreme crowding near the cutoff — small rating fluctuations reshuffle positions — not a collapse in Rust’s popularity. Visual Basic also falls two spots, while R and SQL move into the top 10.

Dart Enters Top 20 Historically, Flutter Ecosystem Key Driver

Dart climbs from #26 to #20, achieving a historic high of 0.74%. TIOBE CEO Paul Jansen attributes this surge to the booming Flutter framework. Flutter’s single‑codebase, multi‑platform deployment (mobile, desktop, web) delivers tangible efficiency gains, and Dart is Flutter’s primary language. Jansen notes that Dart itself lacks unique language innovations; its rise is powered by the expanding Flutter ecosystem and the practical benefits of cross‑platform development. This illustrates a broader industry pattern: a language’s popularity often hinges on the framework, tooling, and application ecosystem it anchors, not solely on syntax or memory‑model advantages.

Meanwhile, Julia — which re‑entered the top 20 last month — falls back to #23. Assembly language returns to the top 20 at #17.

Other Tiers and Index Methodology

Positions 21‑50 continue to see frequent rotation, while languages ranked 51‑100 are separated by minuscule rating differences. TIOBE lists these lower‑ranked languages alphabetically, including ActionScript, Apex, AppleScript, Awk, Bash, and many others.

Conclusion

The TIOBE index is updated monthly, drawing on global engineer counts, course volumes, third‑party vendor data, and search‑engine queries from Google, Baidu, Wikipedia, Bing, and technical communities. It measures popularity , not language quality or actual code production volume. Developers can use it to gauge industry trends and align skills with market demand; enterprises may reference it when selecting technology stacks, but it should not be the sole decision criterion.