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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 istartedi on Friday January 10 2020, @09:45PM
LOC can be a bad metric when it's used as an incentive. IIRC, it was infamously used at IBM or some other well-known place for a while until they realized what a bad idea that was. Programmers were doing exactly what you might think--comment padding, early line breaks, garbage code, #if 0 blocks, etc. just to play to the metric.
OTOH, if programmers are not under pressure to produce LOC and they're all on the same style guide then LOC is a valid way to evaluate *something*. It may not relate to the complexity of the code directly, but if nothing else it relates to how much code you would need to audit in order to understand and secure the project.
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