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Comment by hermitcrab | Hacker News Reader

Firstly, you can sell Mac apps without using the Mac app store. I do. But you have to use a payment processor and still deal with digital certificates, notarization etc.

Secondly, 13,000 line of code is tiny compared to many (most?) commercial apps. I wouldn't consider anything under a million lines of source code as a 'big' code base.

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Indeed, I shipped several desktop apps that were in the low millions SLOC. Looking at some recent private hobby apps, I've consistently approached 100k. The SLOC here is less important than the size of the target audience (and metrics like retention).

This sounds like a ton of templated or auto-generated code. For any well tested, human written code 100k would be a huge undertaking.

As a reference point of reference, CryEngine2 checks in at 1M lines of code and undoubtedly had a large team of developers working on it full time.

>For any well tested, human written code 100k would be a huge undertaking.

It does take a long time for 1 person to write 100k of non-auto generated, tested, documented code. Especially multi platform. But it is definitely doable. I've done it.

It depends a lot on the language. 1k in C is almost nothing, one evening. On the other hand, I usually need a whole week to reach 1k in Python. In both cases I mean well thought-out code without using any code generation tools.

Agree, generally. But LOC depends on the language. 13k lines in Clojure can make almost anything.

Good luck writing an app with a complex GUI in 13k lines of anything.

Back in the days of Delphi, that was trivial. The description of the GUI itself was kept separate (I believe in binary files?) and you basically only used code for interaction/changes. A lot of quite complex apps were written in it before Microsoft and their own stupid decisions basically killed them off.

Define a "GUI" - web, native, or non-native

Define "complex" - is that 38 elements, 130, 510, or 927? Do modals count?

Define a "line" - JS can be minified, Elm is terse. Do you count libraries?

The problem is you're speaking in such vague, ambiguous generalities that you're also falling into the trap of focusing on having "impressive" lengths rather than the nuances of making things in the real world.

Could you write Blender in 13k lines of Clojure? I doubt it.

Depends on the libraries involved. Do you write anything in assembly?

I estimate the FB app is ~3 MLoC of Objective-C++.

I wrote Pascal programs as a kid that were 10KLoC.

LoC is a terrible metric because it's not the size that matters, but how it's used. Smaller that does more is more secure, less buggy, and more nimble inherently.

Edit: A small amount of code can be unique, powerful, and took a great deal of art and skill to arrive at.

Obligatory Bill Gates quote: “Measuring programming progress by lines of code is like measuring aircraft building progress by weight.” However it does have the benefit of being relatively easy to measure.

If you have million lines of code, it’s probably because you can’t tell the difference between the actual, human-written code, and stuff that shouldn’t be committed in the fist place.

My main commercial app is closer to 100k LOC. I don't consider that large. https://successfulsoftware.net/2017/02/10/how-much-code-can-...

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