Rating by RUSSOFT analysts

Since 2008 Russoft collects and analyses the information about Russian software industry. The annual survey includes data on programming tools, operating systems and database management systems in use. 

The data that had been collected during the past decade helped us to track the crucial changes. It has also allowed us to provide the unbiased assessment of observational errors in studying operating systems and software tools popularity.

OPERATING SYSTEMS

MS Windows still keeps the steady leadership. But when in the 2008-2012 period 94-97% of surveyed companies called this OS to be the primary, in the next years this number dropped down to 88-92% (even 84% for once). Thus, we can see the software engineers gradually shifting to other operating systems.

For the last ten years, the second place has been strongly held by the GNU Linux family. However, their popularity level is ranging between 54% and 60% with a rare stepping out of these numbers. The recent years’ surveys imply that the reduction of the gap between GNU Linux Family and the leading OS is explained by the emerging erosion of MS Windows’ popularity. 

From 2010, we see the increasing number of Android references. We can suggest that GNU Linux can lose their second place to Android as early as next year.

It is not quite correct to set Android opposite to Linux. By Linux, we mean the whole family of OSs, based on the same core (GNU Linux Family). Android is built on the Linux base too, but it is used as a mobile OS. That’s why it is so different from the other systems of that kind (both in popularity and in types of devices it is installed on). In the survey, this OS is separated from the others. If we count Android and GNU Linux together we can see that 76% of the companies surveyed are using at least one of these open OSs. 

According to the last two years’ surveys, the market share of MS Windows, MS Windows Phone and Oracle (Sun) Solaris is seemingly declining. In addition, the companies surveyed use Apple OS more often – Mac OS and iOS. It appears that in the sector of the mobile OSs, MS Windows and MS Windows Phone will suffer the fate of Blackberry and Symbian – they will be simply removed from the rating of the major operating systems.

Among other OSs (that didn’t appear in the rating) the surveyed companies mentioned only real-time operating systems — QNX, VxWorks, ThreadX, MQX, each for once.

Top-10 operating systems in use

DBMS

The number of references to almost all the main DBMS doesn’t change a lot every year (as well as their rankings). Random fluctuations of every DBMS weren’t great but still occurred. The only exception was the steadily increasing share of open object-relational database management system PostgreSQL. As a result, the first three of the most popular DBMSs changed for the first time ever. For years they were MS SQL, MySQL, and Oracle. In 2018 PostgreSQL got into it, moving Oracle down to number four. Among the companies with the sales volume over $5 million, PostgreSQL has a strong third position since 2017. 

PostgreSQL (and its varieties) is being actively integrated in Russia. The companies who get more than a half of the income from export sales, use it more often than other developers who are mostly focused on the home market. However, the popularity of PostgreSQL is growing faster notably among the companies, whose main target is Russian IT market. For the last year, this DBMS’ number of mentions increased by two-thirds among the companies that receive more than a half of the income from home market sales. Among mostly export-oriented companies this number increased by one-third. 

DBMS rating doesn’t include 12 systems that were mentioned by those surveyed (last year we didn’t include only 6 systems). In this group, the respondents mentioned MongoDB more often- 10 times (6% from all the surveyed companies). This system was keeping these positions for three previous years, but it wasn’t mentioned that often. 
Among other 12 systems placed in the field ‘others’, only Cassandra and Redis were mentioned twice. One mention had Realm, Raven DB, Raima, NoSQL, Intersystems Cache, OrientDB, BigQuery, Ignite, and Circon, built on PostgreSQL.

The main DBMS in use, % of those surveyed

PROGRAMMING LANGUAGES AND TOOLS

For many years four programming languages (C#, C, C/C++, Java/J2EE) kept their popularity leadership among Russian software engineers, changing their positions only relative to each other. The withdrawal of ‘C’ from that list in 2016 seemed to be temporary and caused by random factors. However, the survey of 2018 showed that ‘C’ is likely to lose its positions at all – it hadn’t just fallen off the TOP-4, it dropped down to the 7th place in the ranking. 

Among the mentioned programming languages that didn’t appear on the list, only HTML5, Python and Swift are mentioned twice. RUBY, JavaScript, 1Ñ, FoxPro, PL/SQL, Objective-C and Kotlin mentioned only once. It is quite indicative that Kotlin, created by the Russian company called JetBrains was mentioned as the basic language that is used as a primary tool. It also took the pretty good 12th-13th position in the rating of languages that companies use but don’t consider as primary. In 2017 Kotlin was noted by Google as one of two (together with Java) recommended languages for mobile systems. Therefore, its appearance in the rating was quite foreseeable. 

HTML5 (the language for sequencing and displaying the web content) was included among the languages in use, but not primary ones. In 2016, it gained 29% at once, and in 2017 raised this number to 34%. 2018 survey shows that this language has already taken the second position after Java. Swift shows visible progress – it has almost entered the TOP-10. 

In the programming tool rating, clear leadership belongs to MS Visual Studio for the past ten years. There’s a fight for the second place and not just between IntelliJ IDEA (built by Petersburg company JetBrains) and free Eclipse, but also joined by Xcode. With this, NetBeans and WebStorm whose popularity visibly increased over the 4 previous years, are not far from them.

Among the tools that weren’t included in the rating, the most frequently mentioned are Android Studio and SubLime (just three times) and also PyCharm, RubyMine and PHPStorm (mentioned twice).

Top-7 programming languages in primary use, % of surveyed companies