Millions of Lines of Code

[Aardwolf]

Interesting graph if it were accurate. The healthcare.gov stuff seems like jokes, right? That makes it seem less accurate. What else in the graph is a joke? E.g. can car software really have more lines of code than a boeing 787, operating systems, and the LHC?

[downandout]

It's not a joke, it's Obamacode. Allegedly there are 500 million lines of code running healthcare.gov. That figure is, of course, wildly inaccurate, not unlike most everything else concerning Obamacare. But their PR people passed this number to journalists in an effort to blame the sheer complexity of the project rather than run-of-the-mill incompetence.

[Blahah]

The figure originates from this Wired article, where it is uncited: http://www.wired.com/autopia/2012/12/automotive-os-war/

I think we can take it with a large helping of skepticism.

[PavlovsCat]

Knowledge is beautiful, but for it to be knowledge it needs more details and sources..

[JosephHatfield]

The chart would be more helpful if it compared lines of assembly and not lines of original code (which is what I suspect it's comparing).

[tzury]

The most surprising item in the list to me is Visual Studio 2012 with 50M LoC (healthcare.gov might considered ridiculous, but after all we observed, it is not surprising at all) .

This is by far, more than I can imagine needed for the most sophisticated IDE one will ever need.

It might includes all compilers for all supported languages though.

Also note they provide many of their infographic works as printed posters at http://store.informationisbeautiful.net/

[loup-vaillant]

About everything we use consume far more lines of source code it could (at least if we rewrite it with current knowledge). See the VPRI and their almost full featured OS (with compilers and applications) in less than 20.000 lines.

(Manifesto) http://www.vpri.org/html/work/ifnct.htm

(Latest progress report) http://www.vpri.org/pdf/tr2011004_steps11.pdf

[Blahah]

Something that might have been interesting (information content of life forms vs. programs) has been wasted by equating base pairs with lines of code. This is totally arbitrary.

Unfortunately I don't know of a specific better measure, but it might consider the used and potential information content in the structures encoded. Anybody know of such a metric for source code complexity?

[VexXtreme]

Ah, lines of code... the most useless metric in software development known to man.

[rohu1990]

wow look at the symbian its double the android

[everyone]

What do the big semicircles with %s mean?

[everyone]

Ok figured it out. Wow that is unclear, its totally illogical too, the size of the circle seems proportional to the increase in LOC in the next random iteration he has chosen, but the diameter is also the distance between them vertically which is based on the order they are in. I reckon there was a lot of hacking and including / not including stuff in order to get those circles to match up and also present stuff in ever increasing order. Also size of circles is arbitrary 100% size cirle is just whatever +organism?? really? That is not helpful

[rtb]

% changes between related items (later versions of the same OS or software package etc)

[Blahah]

Change from one version to the next.