According to GitHub's annual "The State of the Octoverse" report, Dart is the fastest growing language in 2019. GitHub, owned by Microsoft, which also owns LinkedIn, ranked each language by the number of unique contributors to repositories (public and private) tagged with a primary language.

Dart's top spot on this list is interesting given that the language, developed by Google and first released in 2011, topped Codementor's 2018 list of coding languages developers should avoid learning. The eight-year-old language's sudden rise in popularity likely stems from Google's recent moves with Flutter and Fuchsia. Flutter is a cross-platform development toolkit release in 2018. Fuchsia is a new operating system Google has been working on since at least 2016, and according to some, Fuchsia could replace Android by 2023. Both Flutter and Fuchsia use Dart.

In September 2019, Google announced an update to the Dart SDK and the release of Flutter 1.9. The new Dart SDK included a technical preview of ML Complete, which added AI-powered code completion powered by Google's TensorFlow Lite deep-learning framework.

Dart looks like it is here to stay, but only time will tell if it eventually earns a spot on GitHub's list of most popular languages.

GitHub Octoverse: Fastest growing languages

Dart Rust HCL Kotlin TypeScript PowerShell Apex Python Assembly Go

More data points from the 2019 Octoverse report:

Python surpassed Java, PHP, C#, C++, and others to become the second most popular programming language. JavaScript held on to the top spot.

Github had more than 40 million users, 10 million new users, 44 million repositories created, 87 million pull requests, and over 20 million issues closed in the last year.

Nearly 80% of GitHub users come from outside the United States.

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