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Comment by 0wned | Hacker News Reader

You mean simple things. The preamble to the GPL is longer than the entire ISC license... by like 5 times. GCC is like 100 times more complex than PCC. BSD folks like simple, secure things.

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To add some numbers to that, PCC appears to be about 20,000 lines of code [1] and LLVM+clang together about 550,000 lines [2]. I can't immediately find a figure for GCC, but I wouldn't be surprised if it was significantly more than LLVM+clang.

[1] http://www.openbsd.org/papers/magnusson_pcc.pdf [2] http://blog.llvm.org/2009/12/clang-builds-llvm.html

Not that LOC necessarily says anything on code complexity or design, but here's sloccount on gcc42:

  ansic:       869244 (70.89%)
  ada:         150280 (12.26%)
  cpp:         114629 (9.35%)
  f90:          34164 (2.79%)
  sh:           18588 (1.52%)
  objc:         13047 (1.06%)
  exp:           8821 (0.72%)
  fortran:       7139 (0.58%)
  asm:           4422 (0.36%)
  ml:            2485 (0.20%)
  perl:          1080 (0.09%)
  awk:            842 (0.07%)
  lex:            589 (0.05%)
  yacc:           587 (0.05%)
  pascal:         105 (0.01%)
  haskell:         98 (0.01%)
  lisp:            59 (0.00%)

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