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Comment by gpderetta | Hacker News Reader

FWIW, in more than 15 years I've never worked [1] on a project that was less than 1M lines. Sometimes one order of magnitude more. Linking exists because whole program compilation doesn't scale well.

[1] well, except for personal projects, but that's not work.

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Out of curiosity, what sorts of projects have 10M lines?

I hate using this website[1] as a source, but here are some estimates:

    KDE 57.9M LOC, 19402 years of effort

    NetBSD 50M LOC, 16822 years of effort

    Linux kernel 36.6M LOC, 12,369 years of effort

    Google Chrome 25M LOC, 8131 years of effort

    Mozilla Firefox 20.5M LOC, 6564 years of effort

    FreeBSD 17.2 LOC, 5538 years of effort

    GNOME 15.7 LOC, 4946 years of effort

    LibreOffice 9.5M LOC, 2907 years of effort

    QT 5, 8.2M LOC, 2525 years of effort

    OpenJDK 8.4M LOC, 2583 years of effort

    IntelliJ IDEA community 6.1 LOC, 1850 years of effort

    GNU compiler collections 7.5M LOC, 2,327 years of effort

    Blender 3D 2.1M LOC, 612 years of effort

    PostgreSQL 2.0M LOC, 596 years of effort

    TensorFlow 2.5M LOC, 724 years of effort

And that is just counting open source/free software. It's not hard to imagine there is plenty of projects out there that have existed for more than 10 years with more than 10M LOC.

- [1] https://www.quora.com/What-are-some-open-source-projects-wit...

The vast majority of these programs are not ordinarily linked in a single DSO though; KDE and the Linux kernel for example are well-known for containing very large numbers of DSOs. I am also skeptical of this methodology: checking the first project, KDE, on the linked source, Open Hub, it says there are 19 million lines of code, not 58. Of those, only 63% are in C++, with 16% in XML, 6% in PHP (?), etc, which would presumably not count towards a linking cap.

No, they have multiple binaries. But they share a lot of core code. Compiling each one separately from scratch would bloat the binary size even more and be pointlessly slower.

Linux kernel is well north of that. A ue4 based game would be similar in scale to 10m loc (the engine is 5m or so, plus third party, and in my experience the games are as big as the engine often). I'd wager many many many closes source projects are far larger than 10m loc

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