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from the bbbut-they-are-very-short-lines-of-code dept.
Wired has published an interesting article on just how big Google is. I doubt the numbers will surprise anyone here, but they are interesting nonetheless. From the article:
How big is Google? We can answer that question in terms of revenue or stock price or customers or, well, metaphysical influence. But that’s not all. Google is, among other things, a vast empire of computer software. We can answer in terms of code.
Google’s Rachel Potvin came pretty close to an answer Monday at an engineering conference in Silicon Valley. She estimates that the software needed to run all of Google’s Internet services—from Google Search to Gmail to Google Maps—spans some 2 billion lines of code. By comparison, Microsoft’s Windows operating system—one of the most complex software tools ever built for a single computer, a project under development since the 1980s—is likely in the realm of 50 million lines.
So, building Google is roughly the equivalent of building the Windows operating system 40 times over.
The comparison is more apt than you might think. Much like the code that underpins Windows, the 2 billion lines that drive Google are one thing. They drive Google Search, Google Maps, Google Docs, Google+, Google Calendar, Gmail, YouTube, and every other Google Internet service, and yet, all 2 billion lines sit in a single code repository available to all 25,000 Google engineers. Within the company, Google treats its code like an enormous operating system. “Though I can’t prove it,” Potvin says, “I would guess this is the largest single repository in use anywhere in the world.”
This is not the first time I've heard Google's entire cloud-based ecosystem all over the world being compared to one enormous operating system, or even a single computer. It's nice to see confirmation of this concept. As for Windows and its 50 million lines of code? Well, I don't think Windows was that much of an achievement in software engineering since the introduction of Windows 95.
(Score: 2) by bob_super on Friday September 18 2015, @04:31PM
Can people stop taking "lines of code" as a serious metric?
(Score: 2) by ikanreed on Friday September 18 2015, @04:37PM
As soon as there's some other tool that describes the breadth of a codebase more accurately.
It doesn't describe quality: you can have a 40 bedroom house in terrible shape and it's still impressive
It doesn't describe utility: you can have a collection of 30 sports cars, and not need to drive anywhere, and it's still impressive
But it does describe approximately how much effort went into building it.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday September 18 2015, @05:11PM
You could also automatically generate a shit ton of similar code for similar things needlessly. I guess being foolishly verbose is impressive in its own right.
(Score: 1) by SanityCheck on Friday September 18 2015, @04:51PM
I cam here to post and ask how many lines are something like this " {"? Do the Googlesters prefer to keep their curlies on same line or do they go tot he next line? Lines of code is a metric for mundanes who never wrote more than Hello World. Some lines of code are needlessly complex, some are just blank to break up the code in a more sensible way. Some lines took a long time to come up with, some where just else statements. Some lines were needlessly complicated and could serve better as 3-4 lines to make them easier to understand, others were just a waste of space.
Still I suppose if the codebase is that huge and diverse in function with many many devs all contributing to it, you can use it as a metric of time spent simply because it would statistically average itself out. But it is very poor metric of effort.
(Score: 2) by frojack on Friday September 18 2015, @07:20PM
Can people stop taking "lines of code" as a serious metric?
My thoughts exactly.
Depending on programming language, style, and the all too common desire to be two cute by half, a line of code can contain what could be 3 or 6 discrete computational steps. Conversely, you will find the opposite to be true as well, where simple operations that should be one line are spread over two or three lines.
No, you are mistaken. I've always had this sig.
(Score: 1) by rigrig on Saturday September 19 2015, @03:00AM
No, because measuring 'coding efficiency' is -ing hard, and "lines of code" is a pretty good indicator.
Trying to optimize for "lines of code", "number of commits", "number of bugs fixed", etc is stupid.
Asking the department that suddenly fixes half their usual number of bugs, while pushing half as many commits as usual, containing half as much lines of code what is going on makes sense.
(note: you can't s/department/programmer/)
Also, having e.g. a "2 bilion lines of code" OS vs a "50 million lines of code" OS would've been a large enough difference that you would want to know why.
("x lines of OS code" vs "y lines of code in multiple applications": meh)
No one remembers the singer.