zlacker

>>janvdb+(OP)
Interesting to think what a different conclusion the article would have arrived at if he'd chosen to look at GNU cat on Linux. A few sample points:

* 2002: 833 LoC (http://landley.net/aboriginal/history.html)

* 2013: 36kLoC, 2/3rds of them .h files (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11340510#11341175)

* 2018: 37kLoC of .c file dependencies going into libcoreutils.a and some LoC of .h files (coreutils has 60kLoC of .h files)

The methodology for counting lines likely isn't consistent across those data points. But the trend is still unmistakeable. Maybe I'll tree-shake all the dead code out and come up with an accurate line count one of these days..

>>akkart+Xp
This is why I think the movement of the future will be about going back and stripping cruft out of old codebases. We've seen the weaknesses of the bazaar/ many eyes, and the main one IMHO is code complexity, which is often easiest to measure in loc.