Forza Horizon 5, Alaska Airlines, UPS, and Stack Overflow, some of the world’s most recognized names, trust C# to power their critical systems.
This isn’t just nostalgia. In 2025, C#, Microsoft’s object-oriented powerhouse, is still going strong, regularly crowned as one of the most loved languages across surveys.
But just how popular is C# compared to other languages in today’s development ecosystem? How many developers still prefer it?
Let’s see what the data says about C# popularity.
Developer Preference and Adoption Show That C# Is a Consistent Leader
Initially designed by Microsoft in the 2000s for Windows-centric applications, C# now consistently ranks among the top programming languages developers prefer.
As per the TIOBE Index for May 2025, C# is the fifth most popular programming language, with a rating of 4.22%.
While this is a slight dip compared to the previous year, it still shows substantial interest and a solid footing in the developer community.
On the other hand, the Stack Overflow Developer Survey showed C# being used by 27.1% of all respondents, placing it as the 8th most commonly used language. For professional developers, the usage was slightly higher at 28.8% in the 2024 survey iteration.
Notably, .NET (5+) was ranked as the most used "Other framework and library" in the same survey.
Moreover, JetBrains' State of Developer Ecosystem 2023 indicated that C# was the primary language for approximately 3.05 million developers.
What's New In C#?
What we use as C# today is the result of 15+ years of continued innovation. C# version 13, released late in 2024, continues that trend by bringing enhancements across the board.
Highlights include:
- Improved params collections: You can now use the params keyword with
System.Span<T>,System.ReadOnlySpan<T>, and collections implementingSystem.Collections.Generic.IEnumerable<T>. - Better support for ReadOnlySpan<T>: C# 13 allows collection expressions to work directly with
ReadOnlySpan<T>, a high-performance struct that avoids allocations. - Modern thread synchronization with lock: C# now supports the
System.Threading.Lock, which is better compared to theSystem.Threading.Monitorapproach. - Auto properties with custom logic: It’s now easier to declare properties without explicit backing fields. Custom logic can now be included directly within the getters and setters of auto-properties
Where are all these features being used, though? Mostly in application development.
C# Is Thriving in Application Development
C# pairs concise, expressive syntax with the rich .NET ecosystem: powerful libraries, modern tooling, and cross-platform support power reliable, high-performance applications.
Enterprise, Web, and Cloud-Native Development
C# remains a mainstay for large-scale business systems and high-throughput web services.
ASP.NET (the core web framework for C#) powers about 5.1% of all websites with a known server-side language.
Deep Azure integration continues to give C# developers a fast path to scalable cloud services. In 2024, 28% of professional developers said they’ve done extensive work on Azure over the past year, up from 26% in 2023. This mirrors the growing adoption of Functions, App Service, and Kubernetes offerings.
Game Development
Unity’s choice of C# for scripting keeps the language at the heart of modern game creation. Unity’s own data shows that around 70% of all mobile games worldwide run on their engine, and roughly 30% of the top 1,000 PC titles also rely on it.
C# expertise is in constant demand for gameplay logic, tools development and real-time simulations.
Desktop Applications
Even as web and mobile apps grow, C# retains a strong foothold on the desktop.
Frameworks like Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF) and Windows Forms power countless internal tools and customer-facing Windows applications.
They offer mature UI libraries, data binding, and tight OS integration that enterprises still depend on for rich client experiences.
Cross-Platform Development
With .NET MAUI (Multi-platform App UI) and Blazor, you can now use C# to build native mobile (iOS, Android), desktop (Windows, macOS), and even browser-hosted (WebAssembly) UIs from a single codebase.
.NET MAUI has been production-ready since .NET 6 and is seeing steady uptake among organizations consolidating their mobile and desktop efforts. Blazor WebAssembly, meanwhile, lets you write interactive web front-ends entirely in C# and shares libraries and business logic with server-side components.
The Developers Behind C#
Seasoned C# engineers value its mature tooling: Visual Studio Code (used by 73.6% of developers) and Visual Studio (30.6%) topped the 2024 Stack Overflow survey, mostly because they deliver everything from advanced debugging to Azure integration.
In the U.S., the median C# developer base salary is about $117,563 per year, with entry-level roles starting near $96,547 and senior engineers earning up to $155,920 annually.
Globally, remote C# positions average $70,966 per year, and seasoned remote specialists report salaries around $86,315
Most professional web developers favor ASP .NET for their sites and RESTful services. 5.9% of survey respondents list Unity (with C# scripting at its core) among their primary tools. 3.1% use .NET MAUI to target iOS, Android, Windows and macOS from one C# codebase.
C# and AI
C# is quickly gaining traction in AI application development.
Microsoft’s ML.NET framework has seen over 9.7 million total downloads, with core packages like c and Microsoft.ML.ImageAnalytics each exceeding 3 million downloads.
On the deployment side, the official OpenAI .NET library (2,000+ GitHub stars) plus community SDKs like Betalgo’s wrapper simplify calling GPT-4, DALL·E, and other large-language or vision models directly from C# applications.
Meanwhile, Azure’s Cognitive Services and Azure OpenAI integrations let you wire up text analysis, vision, and speech capabilities with a few lines of C# and configuration.
Web Scraping with C#
Lightweight web scraping with C# is easy when you combine its built-in HTTP libraries with mature HTML parsers
- HTTP requests:
HttpClientprovides async, high-performance calls to fetch pages or APIs with just a few lines of C#. - HTML parsing:
HtmlAgilityPackhas over 225 million NuGet downloads and excels at handling malformed or real-world HTML. AngleSharp implements the W3C DOM and CSS standards for precise querying. - Browser automation: For JavaScript-heavy sites, the Selenium.WebDriver .NET bindings let you control real browsers and scrape dynamic content.
This toolkit is enough for C# devs to build dependable scrapers that scale from simple data pulls to even authenticated workflows.
The Road Ahead for C# Is Bright
C# continues to grow in lockstep with the broader .NET platform, and the .NET 9 release reinforces that direction. It has over 1,000 performance improvements, adaptive Server-GC, and Arm64 vectorization. This means C# applications will run faster and more efficiently, especially in cloud-native and microservices environments.
Looking ahead at the language itself, the latest C# enriches your toolset with
- Raw string literals for cleaner multi-line text and embedded JSON or XML without escapes
- Primary constructors on regular classes to declare and assign properties in one line
- List patterns for declarative matching of sequences and arrays
- Generic math support to write numeric algorithms once, for all number types.
It’s pretty obvious that C# remains primed for whatever development trend comes next.
Frequent Questions
Is C# becoming more popular?
C# ranked among the top 10 most-used languages in the 2024 Stack Overflow Developer Survey, with growing usage in cloud, enterprise, and AI applications.
What is C# coding used for?
C# is used to build web apps, APIs, desktop software, games (via Unity), mobile apps (.NET MAUI), cloud services (Azure), and even AI-powered tools with ML.NET and Azure AI.
Is C# different from C++?
Yes. C# is a managed, high-level language designed for the .NET platform with memory safety and modern tooling. C++, on the other hand, is lower-level, giving more control over memory and performance but with more complexity.