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Comment by overcast | Hacker News Reader

"In 2011, Yelp had more than a million lines of code in a single monolithic repo"

Did I read that correctly, the Yelp product is a MILLION lines of code?

For comparison, the Doom 3 source code has 601,000.

It's quite easy to get to that number of lines once you have code for integrations with other products, monitoring, devops, patched versions of broken or unmaintained libraries, a growing number of tests etc. We run a relatively small product and we already have 30k lines with just two people.

It's not that surprising. Some estimates (I could be way off)

100 Engineers x 50 lines of code per engineer per week x 50 weeks per year (2 week vacation) x 4 years = ~ 1 million LOC

Sweet jesus. Engineers that only produce code and never delete any are like cancer.

I think that is why the weekly number is only 50. It's a net.

Not to mention that some number of those LOC are unit tests / integration tests (Which can take more code than a feature.)

mmh. usually the LoC of unittests/integration/end2end are much more than the code under test. In my experience: between 3-6 times as much.

What do Doom 3 and Yelp have to do with each other?

You'd hope a CRUD app used in "hello world" tutorials (https://www.fullstackreact.com/articles/react-tutorial-cloni...) would be simpler than a 3d physics engine.

Displaying a list and showing a map is one feature of Yelp, but you could also say showing "hello world" in 3D text with OpenGL is a 3D graphics engine. In the real world they are both complicated things.

You realize that just because a tutorial that purports to build a Yelp clone does not mean that it will actually teach you to build the entirety of the Yelp app, right?

I work on a code base based on UE4. There's well over 3million LOC.

Maybe counting all the dependencies? You know, you need millions of lines of code to run an npm powered js app :)

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