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The Linux kernel has around 27.8 million lines of code in its Git repository, up from 26.1 million a year ago, while systemd now has nearly 1.3 million lines of code, according to GitHub stats analysed by Michael Larabel at Phoronix.
There were nearly 75,000 code commits to the kernel during 2019 which is actually slightly down on 2018 (80,000 commits), and the lowest number since 2013. The top contributors by email domain were Intel and Red Hat (Google's general gmail.com aside) and the top contributing individuals were Linus Torvalds, with 3.19 per cent of the commits, followed by David Miller (Red Hat) and Chris Wilson (Intel). There were 4,189 different contributors overall.
Another point of interest is that systemd, a replacement for init that is the first process to run when Linux starts, is now approaching 1.3 million lines of code thanks to nearly 43,000 commits in 2019. Top contributor was not systemd founder Lennart Poettering (who was second), but Yu Watanabe with 26.94 per cent of the commits.
[...] Larabel has published statistics on coding activity for the Linux kernel here and for systemd here.®
(Score: 4, Insightful) by Arik on Friday January 10 2020, @08:19PM (1 child)
Well, it is a metric, as in something objectively measurable. So valid, and real. Interesting is at least partly subjective.
"Are more lines better then few lines?"
No, all other things being equal, few lines are better than more, but there are so many caveats to add to that it's still nearly meaningless.
"What if I write code where I just push a lot of things onto one line instead of spreading it across say 3-4 lines? Which one is better?"
Spreading it out is usually better, and you're touching one of those caveats. Readability. But that's fundamentally subjective. Cramming it all together on one line may make it difficult for one person to read, but another person might find it easier to see the whole function in one line and not have to mentally stitch several together, so there's no universal right or wrong there.
Counting characters instead of lines would probably be marginally more useful though, as the two cases are identical aside from subjective considerations, but counting lines makes it seem like adding three or four carriage returns represents a multiplication of the work involved in the entire function, which it obviously is not.
"This seem like an utterly crap metric for anything useful really."
Pretty much. The first time it was used for back of the envelope guesstimation it seemed kind of clever, but it's nothing more than that.
If laughter is the best medicine, who are the best doctors?
(Score: 2) by Freeman on Monday January 13 2020, @04:12PM
The bean counters can use it in their algorithms. Also, bragging rights.
Joshua 1:9 "Be strong and of a good courage; be not afraid, neither be thou dismayed: for the Lord thy God is with thee"