50 million line code rumor

  • Thread starter Thread starter Puppy Breath
  • Start date Start date
No, LOC is not meaningless. It is a measure of size and complexity. The
fact that windows is as large as it is explains why we see so many problems
that MS seems to have so much trouble fixing them.

The larger and more complicated something is, the more difficult it is to
maintain.

Ed


Robert Moir said:
Puppy said:
Anyone know if there's any truth to the rumor about Vista being up to
50 million lines of code?
Click to expand...

"lines of code" is a meaningless measurement.

If I code a function in C# it might take five lines. If I code it in
assembler it might take 50.

The assembler version might be the faster version. Despite using more
'lines of code' it will probably be more 'compact' in terms of memory and
processor cycles used.

Lets also consider style:

static void Main(string[] args)
{
Console.WriteLine
(
"Hello World"
);
}

7 lines to say "Hello World" in c#

Or, you could say:
static void Main(string[] args)
{
Console.WriteLine("Hello World");
}
4 lines. Exactly the same bit of code. Except that in the 2nd example its
actually readable.
Click to expand...
 
How sure are you?
Microsoft keeps the code pretty tight.
There are programs where people get access to part of the source code for
various projects.
My guess is if this person was given the source code, it had little or
nothing to do with bugs submitted and number of bug submissions may have
been a coincidence.
 
OK I think she must have meant it as a joke, but either way it would have
been funny if they delivered ;o)

--
Zack Whittaker
» ZackNET Enterprises: www.zacknet.co.uk
» MSBlog on ResDev: www.msblog.org
» Vista Knowledge Base: www.vistabase.co.uk
» This mailing is provided "as is" with no warranties, and confers no
rights. All opinions expressed are those of myself unless stated so, and not
of my employer, best friend, Ghandi, my mother or my cat. Glad we cleared
that up!

--: Original message follows :--
 
Ed said:
No, LOC is not meaningless. It is a measure of size and
complexity. The fact that windows is as large as it is explains why
we see so many problems that MS seems to have so much trouble fixing
them.
Click to expand...

But as per the example of issues with how code is written in my original
post, the measurement is meaningless due to the way code can be written in
different styles and the exact same code can use different amounts of lines.

Unless you want to define "logical lines of code", which is a little better
but again difficult to police.
The larger and more complicated something is, the more difficult it
is to maintain.
Click to expand...

Yes, I don't disagree with you there, I'm just not sure that LOC works as a
way of comparing one product to another. As a measurement of how much work
you've done since the last time you counted, then maybe.
 
It matter not how code is written, as LOC is still a measure of size and
complexity. Anything that gets in the million+ LOC is a huge beast,
regardless of language or style.

It's true that comparing one project to another using LOC is not usually a
fair comparison. However given any language, it still works well for seeing
overall scale and size.

There are lots of other factors that come into play when considering
software complexity. LOC is one measure, but so is size of the development
team, age of the existing product, factors like whether the original
developers are still around, availability of test hardware, location and
geographic dispersion of the development team, security classification,
software development standards, and a bunch of other things.

It seems clear that Windows is a huge complex beast. All one has to do is
to look at the current beta of Vista to see what a mess that must have to
work with. So many obvious things are messed up. Even simple things like
picking an icon for desktop display are broken.

Perhaps the next release will be much better. I guess time will tell.

Ed
 
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