Building with GitHub Copilot

Supported Programming Languages

GitHub Copilot offers support for a broad range of languages and frameworks, with enhanced capabilities and better performance for C, C++, C#, Go, Java, JavaScript, Kotlin, PHP, Python, Ruby, Rust, Scala, and TypeScript. Additionally, it is adept at assisting with query generation for various databases, including SQL, GraphQL, and MongoDB. Scripting languages like Bash and PowerShell are also supported.

To say that Copilot is available for all languages and frameworks would be an overstatement - many sources claim that there are between 250 and 2,500 programming languages in existence, and Copilot is far from supporting them all. However, the most popular languages and frameworks are well covered. If you're a Swift developer or work with any other programming language not on the core list above, you can still use GitHub Copilot in your IDE. You may not get the same level of performance as with the aforementioned languages, but your experience will still be excellent.

If you are using YAML to write Kubernetes manifests, Terraform to manage infrastructure, Dockerfile to build containers, Ansible to automate tasks, HTML/CSS to build static websites, SQL to query databases, or even Markdown to write documentation, GitHub Copilot will assist you like a pro. Commands like "Generate a cache-optimized Dockerfile for a PHP application" or "Create a Kubernetes deployment manifest for a Node.js app with 3 replicas and a load balancer on DigitalOcean" will yield impressive results with the appropriate context and right prompts, even if these are not programming languages per se.

Because the generative models powering Copilot were built using code from the internet and more specifically from GitHub, the tool is more likely to perform better when its models have seen more code in a specific language or framework. This is why the most popular languages and frameworks are likely to have better performance than less popular ones. To speculate, we could look at classic sources providing programming language rankings like the TIOBE index