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Comment by jeffbee | Hacker News Reader

Can we talk about “world’s largest”? This seems extremely unlikely by any measure.

Going by lines of code, Linux is probably not the largest: https://www.informationisbeautiful.net/visualizations/millio...

Linux currently has around 30 million lines of code I believe.

Surprised the 5ESS wasn't mentioned on here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/5ESS_Switching_System

> The development effort for 5ESS required five thousand employees, producing 100 million lines of system source code, mostly in the C language, with 100 million lines of header files and makefiles.

Granted, this section is suspiciously citation-free, so it's fair to take it with a grain of salt.

Is an "average modern high-end car" just a bunch of computers connected together? Each of them is running its own software. Then is the total number LOC in a car actually the total number LOC in each of these computer added up?

Except there may not be any Lines Of Code in any of those computers. The code is the blueprint to make the machine not the machine itself. The program, or binary as some like to call it, does not really come in lines.

Possibly the largest open source software project? I know it says Open Office is bigger but it seems like Linux has grown since then.

What do you think is a larger software project? Could argue for SQLite being deployed more widely. But it's hardly even 1% of the overall code surface of the Linux kernel.

Android? They need to develop "repo" tool to use git. Similarly, Windows should be bigger (though it's closed source) so they develop VFSforGit tool.

Android runs a linux kernel under the hood, so it seems hard to make the argument that it is a bigger software project.

As for windows, I'm fairly certain that more devices run the linux kernel than Windows as well.

I think "Largest" is for codebase size. For most widespread software project, it would be SQLite or Zlib.

What about by number of contributors?

Looks good metric than how it widespread.

Well, interestingly Microsoft claims that Windows is the largest git repo on the planet (2017).

And it looks bigger than Linux by its repo size:

> the Windows code base is approximately 3.5M files and, when checked in to a Git repo, results in a repo of about 300GB. Further, the Windows team is about 4,000 engineers and the engineering system produces 1,760 daily “lab builds” across 440 branches in addition to thousands of pull request validation builds.

https://devblogs.microsoft.com/bharry/the-largest-git-repo-o...

kinda feel like the title is earned. Linux (to my knowledge) is the most used operating system in the world and runs on all of the top 500 fastest super computers.

MINIX also makes that claim by virtue of running on the Intel ME.

How about if we just acknowledge this is debatable and completely beside the point of any of this and save ourselves the time?

> by any measure

It should be the world's largest collaboration project on Earth, by the number of contributing companies.

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