Vague estimate is that there are 18 million programmers in the world[1] and that 4% of them use Go[2], so 0.7 million would be a starting point guess as the total number.
Note that these were the first two Google search results I found for "number of programmers in the world" and "percentage of programmers in different languages" so... being off by a factor of 10 or more is likely.
These numbers seem pretty accurate, and I wouldn't expect that they're off by anywhere like a factor of 10.
Think about it: the number of programmers in the world is certainly not off by 10 factor - no way there are 180 million programmers in the world, only 18 of which are visible.
Similarly, there's no way that 43% of programmers in the world are Go programmers, that's again quite clearly off.
I think an estimate of 700k Go programmers makes a lot of sense, maybe with a factor of x2. I would very strongly doubt that there are more than 2 million Go programmers in the world.
For the their purposes, the people who would care are those who are currently maintaining a significant Go codebase.
So even if you did Go full-time for 5 years, but then switched to Rust and now work full-time in Rust, you would not mind at all if the language added some backward-incompatible changes.
In fact you'd probably welcome them, since often you moved away because of features the language was missing.
Not sure, but I wouldn't be surprised. There seem to be a lot of Go developers in China and elsewhere who don't really participate in the English-speaking Go community.
I don't really see a reason why there'd be a large iceberg of Go developers in China. There's no reason why programmers in China would use Go in higher proportion than elsewhere in the world.
Perhaps those languages also enjoy wider adoption in China than elsewhere in the world? Similarly, the software engineering industry has certainly advanced more rapidly in China than elsewhere in the world (as an artifact of China's rapid economic development), so their language adoption is likely skewed toward more recent languages (like Go).
These are good points, but the bottom line is "we don't really know". So I'd caution against assuming the number is very high just because it fits our hopes.
Are there really "millions" (plural) of Go programmers?
Sounds like a bit of an overestimate, no?