An analysis of Debian Sarge source code in main
I read in latest Debian Weekly News an analysis of Debian Source code made by Spanish students. In fact, they just ran the SLOCCount utility of David A. Wheeler. But I find always interesting to have up-to-date figures: it gives some hints on the accomplishment made by the free software community.
You'll find the report at: http://www.upgrade-cepis.org/issues/2005/3/up6-3Amor.pdf
About 60% of software in Sarge are written in C, 17% in C++. OCaml is not counted explicitely, but ML is at 0.31%. :(
The biggest programs are:
- OpenOffice.org (1.1.3): more than 5 millions of lines;
- Linux kernel (2.6.8): 4M;
- NVU: ~2.5M;
- Mozilla (1.7.7): ~2.5M;
- GCC (3.4.3): 2.4M;
- XFS-XTT (1.4.1): 2.3M;
- Xfree86 (4.3.0): 2.3M.
I'm quite surprised by the size of NVU, but I suppose this is because it is based on Mozilla: most lines of code are probably duplicates of Mozilla's code. XFS-XTT size is also surprising.
I like those figures because they give some hints on the complexity of modern softwares. We need to design programming languages and programming environments that help to write software of more than 10 million lines of code. None of the languages I've seen so far help much in managing so complex programs. Of course, counting lines of code is a rough metric and programs written in high level languages (O'Caml, Haskell) need less lines of code for the same functionnality.
2005-12-27T15:25:17Z [] permanent link
