GNOME developer Sophie Herold has shared some interesting end-of-year code stats for the GNOME project. The "GNOME" codebase is up to 6,692,516 lines of code at the end of 2025 with 1,611,526 lines of that being from GNOME apps. Where the data gets interesting is on the programming language breakdown in different areas.

Of the official GNOME Core apps, Sophie found that 44.8% of them are written in the C programming language. That's followed by Vala with 20.7% and then JavaScript at 13.8%. Following JS is Rust with 10.3% of the GNOME Cores apps codebase being in Rust. Trailing Rust is Python at 6.9% and C++ at 3.45%.

While C dominates the GNOME Core apps, when it comes to the community GNOME Circle Apps the most popular programming language is Rust at 41.7%. C meanwhile is used in just 5.56% of the GNOME Circle apps codebases. Python is also much more popular here at 29.2% and then Vala at 12.5%. Of GNOME Circle apps, JavaScript is even used more than C with 9.72%.

C also dominated when looking at the language use among GNOME's components/libraries. C was in use for 76% of the codebase followed by Rust at 10.3% and Vala at 3.77%.

Those curious about these end of year GNOME 2025 code statistics can find all the interesting details over on Sophie's blog .