What Do 2022 StackOverflow Survey Results Reveal About Developers' Tool and Language Choices?

StackOverflow released its 2022 Developer Survey, gathering responses from more than 70,000 developers. The independent, vendor‑neutral study covers a wide range of programming languages and development platforms, making it a valuable resource for tracking industry trends.

One disappointing statistic remains unchanged: 91.88% of respondents are male, indicating a persistent gender imbalance similar to 2021.

Visual Studio Code tops the list of editors and IDEs used by professional developers.

TypeScript usage rose to 40.08% from 36.42% last year, while JavaScript, still the most popular language, slipped slightly to 67.9%.

In the database sector, PostgreSQL surged to 46.48% usage among professional respondents, overtaking MySQL, which fell behind after leading in 2021. IBM DB2 remains the most dreaded database (74% fear it), and 64.67% of developers dislike Oracle. Microsoft SQL Server retains a modest share at 28.77%.

Among web frameworks, Node.js leads with 46.31%, followed by React.js at 44.31% and jQuery at 29.21%. React continues to grow, and Next.js appears at 13.93% (ranked 9th). Newer .NET web options such as Blazor (4.92%) and Deno (1.47%) also appear.

For cross‑platform mobile development, React Native (13.62%) and Flutter (12.56%) are the most popular, while Xamarin holds only 5.54%. Observers are watching Microsoft’s MAUI to see if it revives interest.

IDE usage shows VS Code at 74.48%, up from 71.07% in 2021. JetBrains IntelliJ family tools collectively reach about 29.45%, comparable to Visual Studio’s 32.33%. Eclipse’s market share declined to 12.26%, and the Eclipse Foundation promotes Theia, built on the same Monaco editor as VS Code.

Rust ranks among the most loved languages at 86.73%, but only 8.8% of professionals use it, far behind C++ (20.17%) and C (16.7%).

In source‑code management, 96.65% of developers use Git, while SVN drops to 5.96%. The command‑line interface is preferred by 84.588% over IDE integrations (54.38%). GitHub holds 55.93% market share, GitLab 28.9%, and AWS Code only 2.7%.

Overall, the 2022 survey shows increased adoption of VS Code, JavaScript/TypeScript, React.js, and Git among professional developers compared to the previous year.