You can spend an evening on a fix, send the pull request, and hear nothing for weeks.

A night street where ten houses light their porch lamps one by one, in order of how fast each project replies, with its reply time above the house

I track this in Porchlamp, a ranking I built of open source projects by what happens to pull requests from outsiders. At the typical ranked project, the first human reply takes about 19.5 hours.

The 30 projects below are much quicker. At every one, half the outside pull requests hear from a person in under four and a half hours.

How to use this list

Pick a language, then a project you already use. Add /contribute to its GitHub address, like github.com/curl/curl/contribute. That page lists open issues marked for newcomers.

Rust

A night street of five houses with their porch lamps on, one for each Rust project in the table below

The compiler itself is here. Half the outside pull requests to rust-lang/rust get a human reply in about 70 minutes.

Project What it is Median first reply
probe-rs/probe-rs Debugging tools for embedded ARM and RISC-V 58 min
ruffle-rs/ruffle A Flash Player emulator 1.0 h
rust-lang/rust The Rust compiler and standard library 1.2 h
rust-lang/cargo The Rust package manager 1.4 h
servo/servo A lightweight browser engine 1.4 h

Python

A night street of five houses with their porch lamps on, one for each Python project in the table below

Astronomers answer quickest here: Astropy's median is 1.8 hours.

Project What it is Median first reply
astropy/astropy Core library for astronomy 1.8 h
pallets/click A toolkit for command line interfaces 2.5 h
numpy/numpy The core package for scientific computing 3.4 h
inventree/InvenTree Inventory management you host yourself 3.4 h
home-assistant/core Home automation with local control 4.2 h

JavaScript

A night street of five houses with their porch lamps on, one for each JavaScript project in the table below

freeCodeCamp has more than 450,000 stars and still replies in about two and a half hours.

Project What it is Median first reply
ag-grid/ag-grid A data table for web apps 45 min
playcanvas/engine A web graphics runtime 1.7 h
faker-js/faker Generates fake data for tests 1.8 h
RaspberryPiFoundation/blockly A visual programming editor 1.9 h
freeCodeCamp/freeCodeCamp The learning platform and its curriculum 2.5 h

Go

A night street of five houses with their porch lamps on, one for each Go project in the table below

Dolt, a database you can branch and merge like Git, replies in 24 minutes.

Project What it is Median first reply
dolthub/dolt Git for data 24 min
hajimehoshi/ebiten A simple 2D game engine 41 min
k3s-io/k3s Lightweight Kubernetes 1.7 h
go-gitea/gitea Self-hosted Git service 1.7 h
pulumi/pulumi Infrastructure as code 3.2 h

Java

A night street of five houses with their porch lamps on, one for each Java project in the table below

JabRef manages BibTeX libraries for people who write papers, and it replies in under two hours.

Project What it is Median first reply
vespa-engine/vespa A search and AI platform 1.3 h
crate/crate A distributed SQL database 1.6 h
traccar/traccar A GPS tracking platform 1.8 h
JabRef/jabref A reference manager 1.9 h
strimzi/strimzi-kafka-operator Apache Kafka on Kubernetes 3.7 h

C and C++

A night street of five houses with their porch lamps on, one for each C and C++ project in the table below

Stockfish, the chess engine, and curl both reply in under three hours.

Project What it is Median first reply
RIOT-OS/RIOT An operating system for IoT 1.2 h
RPCS3/rpcs3 A PlayStation 3 emulator 1.4 h
libsdl-org/SDL Cross-platform media library 2.0 h
official-stockfish/Stockfish A strong open chess engine 2.3 h
curl/curl The tool and library for fetching URLs 2.7 h

What normal looks like

Bar chart of the median first reply by language: Rust 15.0 hours, C and C++ 15.3, Java 18.5, Go 18.9, JavaScript 21.8, Python 22.7

More than half of the 3,246 projects I could time give a first reply within a day. Rust and C and C++ are quickest; Python takes longest.

So if you've waited a week, you're past the median at more than 9 in 10 of them. A short, polite comment is fair at that point.

Check your own project

Every ranked project has a page with its reply time and how many outsiders heard nothing. Search for yours on porchlamp.org.

Longer lists, ordered by reply time: Rust, Python, JavaScript, Go, Java, C and C++.

Ranked for first-time contributors: Rust, Python, JavaScript, Go, Java, C and C++.

How I picked these
Numbers come from Porchlamp's snapshot of 2 November 2026, covering pull requests from 27 April to 24 October 2026.

"Outside" leaves out bots, drafts, pull requests their authors closed, brand-new accounts and each project's own members.

To qualify, a project needed all of these:

  • at least 100 timed outside pull requests
  • under 10% with no reply within 14 days
  • a place in the top 1,500 of the 4,044 ranked projects

I dropped medians under 15 minutes, which can be automation rather than a person. From the rest I took five open source projects per language that I thought readers would know.

A fast first reply is not a merge. It tells you someone is reading.


Which project answered you fastest? I'd like to check it against the numbers.