I know it's a meaningless metric, but I still find myself wondering how, exactly, vlang got to 35K stars on github, very much in the same order of magnitude as, say, cpython with 58K.
So I'm not sure if that's evidence of metric boosting by a click farm, or anything else. Clicking on the question mark, it looks like it's not really a ranking of "where do searches come from", but rather "how popular is it in this region":
> Numbers represent search interest relative to the highest point on the chart for the given region and time. A value of 100 is the peak popularity for the term. A value of 50 means that the term is half as popular. A score of 0 means there was not enough data for this term.
But Go is a working programming language.
- number of contributors
- number of open/closed pull requests
- number of open/closed issues
Most of the time they scale with stars, but sometimes there will be 1k+ stars but only a few pull requests, which is odd.