Million Lines of Code | Information is Beautiful

Is a million lines of code a lot? How many lines are there in Windows? Facebook? iPhone apps?

» Did we miss any? Let us know.
» See the data: http://bit.ly/KIB_linescode
» Read the Reddit discussion

Updated with clarifications & additions. Thanks to Joe Sadoski, Axel Naumann @ CERN, Daniel Nilsson, Flavio Lehner, Richard Hartmann, Rex Stover, Marius Bauer.
» See previous version

Subject

Credits

concept & design: David McCandless
research: Pearl Doughty-White, Miriam Quick

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http://www.adamlofting.com Adam Lofting

I love the design of this, but am struggling to see how the front-end of Facebook could constitute 60 million + lines of code? I might be missing something here so I tried to look at the source document but it’s currently locked.
- Matt Spaul
  
  It’s not the site itself, but all the data collection and interpretation techniques that are serverside not userside. A large amount of this code is to ensure security.
- David_Beautiful
  
  Yep, well-spotted. Typo. It’s 62 MLOC *with* backend. 9 million or so without. Will amend shortly.
  
  Estimated from here: http://www.quora.com/Facebook-Engineering/How-many-lines-of-code-is-Facebook
  - http://www.adamlofting.com Adam Lofting
    
    Ah, that sounds more like it. Thanks for the quick reply, and great work again on this.
  - nmtucson
    
    Yes, great work. One question though, given that your FB numbers had backend included, does the 400 million number for healtcare.gov include backend code? Any way to know how much of the code is included for such backend tasks as verifying identity with SocSec, determining tax status and income via IRS, determining individual state requirements and regulations, interacting with hundreds (thousands?) of insurance company databases to obtain and reformat disparate data on plan features and costs, etc? BTW, it took me all of three tries to get an account set up and two more tries to get an exhaustive list of plan options.
    - Mickey Bigelow
      
      There should also be browser compatibility in there, though that should only be a few lines of code each. But since this is contracted government project they probably are getting paid per line of code or something stupid like that. (Which only encourages poor programming.)
Bruce

I thought Windows 2000/XP/Vista/7 were extensions of NT, not 3.1. Didn’t the 3.1 kernel die w/ 95/98/Me?
- AD
  
  You’re right and the chart is wrong. NT 4.0 should connect to Windows 2000 (NT 5.0) and 3.1 should connect to nothing else in that chart.
  - Domo
    
    There actually was code inherited by NT 3.5 from windows 3.1, but it was just the GUI & WinAPI, a small part compared to the nt kernel & other stuff.
Yeseylon

Is it just me, or does the amount of code for what should be a simple website (healthcare.gov) seem a bit excessive?
- MJP
  
  It’s a simple website that needs to talk to 50 different state governments, the federal government, over a hundred different insurance companies, all of who are running different systems and have their data in different formats. The website part is trivial. Make it do everything it needs to do quickly is crazy,
- David_Beautiful
  
  The 500 million lines of code figure seems exaggerated. Obamacare is complex. But 10 Hadron Collider’s worth?
  - TR1
    
    Yes, it seems the article the creator got it from is citing a “specialist” who seems to have pulled the figure out of thin air. Perhaps it would crest tens of millions of lines if: they’re including third party libraries, every single involved agency’s systems, and raw *lines* in each file(including whitespace and comments). But the 500 million estimation is completely outrageous and the creator should know better.
    - Fran Dias
      
      Healthcare.gov might be counting every single rendered html page…
      
      That’s still way off. Source for that should be directly cited so we can all call them a doofus.
    - Steve
      
      It’s such a round number: half a billion, poof, pulled from the air just like that.
  - Rick Gutleber
    
    The 500-million figure sounds crazy, but conceivable. It’s an enormous system that no doubt involves a level of integration with other systems on a scale that is rare outside of the government… in any event, it’s a huge project.
    
    But how in the world is there 100,000,000 lines of code in a car?! Even if it were all assembly language, that number boggles my mind.
    - gjbloom
      
      That 100-million lines of code in a car figure is complete hogwash. Inflated by a factor of 1000, at least. If each line compiles down to just 10 bytes, that’s over a gigabyte of memory, just to hold the various executables. Last I knew, the image for an ECU weighed in at around a single megabyte. To get 100-million lines, they must have totalled the source code in all the CAD and CAM and payroll and inventory and CRM programs needed to run the entire company that produces the car. Even then, 100-million lines of code stretches credulity.
      - David
        
        The ECU in a car has a larger footprint that you’d suspect. Just the OBD2 response interface is many thousands of lines.
        But that doesn’t count the in-car mapping, entertainment and communications functions, which include (for example) a heavily customised Linux install plus all the heavyweight applications.
      - Marius Volkhart
        
        This number surprised me at first as well, but when you think about high end Mercedes or Audi it starts to make sense. Mercedes has self-driving models they are developing which surely have a lot of computation code. Tesla has the entire center console which is all digital. Plus when you add up the logic of all the different micro-controllers onboard such as the one which controls AUDI OLED taillights, or BMW headlights that turn around the corner for you, or even the sensors which detect your tire pressure. Not to mention stereos w/ support for MP3 decoding, XM radio, and Meta-data parsing, it all starts to add up.
- Joe
  
  not when you take the health insurance technology they needed to integrate with into consideration. I don’t know how they went about this but I’ve seen at least a million lines of back end code for one state for one particular set of providers and that was only quoting.
murgo

TIL: Firefox is a game.
- Fister Roboto
  
  Are you colorblind?
vipercc

Why is Firefox (latest) and Mozilla Core colored as “game”?
Terry A Davis

I am the best programmer on the planet. TempleOS is 87,000 lines of code. My HolyC compiler makes x86_64 machine code and it is 20,000 lines of code.
Openuris

I can almost guarantee much of this could be attributed to poor coding. I re-wrote a paypal integration script a few years ago. The version that Paypal provided had over 190,000 lines of code in more than 1000 individual files. Was able to organize and produce the same script in under 500 lines total and less than 5 files while conforming to generally accepted best practices. WHile we can only speculate, this sounds like a case of serious QA undersight and poor quality coding for such a simple application.
- http://campayn.com/ Nebojsa Cinger
  
  Indeed it is poor coding. Compare Windows 7, Windows XP and Windows Vista.
- Rick Gutleber
  
  Copy-and-paste coding is as alive as ever. I’m sure the amount of redundancy in the code is enormous.
  
  I’m betting this was true in the Paypal example you described… even if there aren’t literally huge blocks of code copy-and-pasted, there are no doubt multiple modules and/or functions that do the same thing. Right?
  
  Any code I’ve ever had a chance to properly “clean up” will decrease in size significantly, and usually end up a lot faster, too.
- TR1
  
  Even so, that’s still a far, *far* cry from 500m LOC.
- willbest
  
  I am convinced that the bottom 80% of programmers these days don’t bother with efficiency because the hardware is so damn powerful it rarely matters.
- Michael Barnathan
  
  I’m more inclined to blame poor counting than poor coding. The actual size is probably far less than 500m.
http://jgomo3.blogspot.com/ Jesús Gómez

Why does Firefox have the “Game color”?
- David_Beautiful
  
  Because Chr0m3 rul3z – makes Firefox look like toy!
- Rui L
  
  Maybe they confused with Titus the Fox
AD

There should be no connecting line from “Windows 3.1” to “Windows 2000”. There should be one from “Windows NT 4.0” to “Windows 2000” because Windows 2000 is based on NT and in fact Windows NT 5.0.
http://int64.org Cory Nelson

I guess that you are including the source code to the libraries and toolchains with Visual Studio 2012?
- Rick Gutleber
  
  That wouldn’t affect the totals all that much. Windows is huge!
Kira00

Lol, I guess what you should learn from this is that government programs requires the most amount of work! Probably because they don’t have earn the money they are spending, but just steal it from others through taxes. What dumb fucks wrote that code?
Guest

How can I get in contact with the creator of this for an interview in Fast Company?
- David_Beautiful
  
  http://www.informationisbeautiful.net/contact/
Eugen Fournes

I’d like to see these added: Google search engine, all of the active Google code put together (search engine, Chrome, Android, all the apps they’ve written, etc.), all of the active (supported) Microsoft code put together, the human genome represented as 72-character lines (or some other appropriate break point), an “average” commercial website (with shopping cart), the Amazon site and Amazon Cloud services, VM-Ware ESX, Minecraft, progression of a game series like Grand Theft Auto, and Steam.
Zidaane

Cool fact. The shuttle code did not change from the original code written in 1975-76.

You can still teach yourself HAL/S in case you are in some situation and need to know how to code space vehicles for re-entry.

http://klabs.org/richcontent/software_content/hal_s/programming_in_hal-s.pdf

Article about it here: http://klabs.org/DEI/Processor/shuttle/shuttle_primary_computer_system.pdf
da_dude

No love for LibreOffice?
Hue G. Rection

The healthcare.gov site does not require that much code. I’ve no idea why you even put it in there, as it’s not open source, so unless you have leaks…you’re making shit up.
guest

In order to produce 500 MLOC, a lot of it is going to be auto-generated by the development suite or compiler. Even with copying-and-pasting, no person or group is manually generating anywhere near that amount. If true, this is inexcusably awful coding by inexperienced developers, plain and simple.
GulliblePublic

If you REALLY believe ObamaCare website has 500 million lines of code.. I have some snake oil to sell you! Wow, some jackass makes an exaggerated claim and the NY Times posts it as fact. You people are pretty gullible.
GulliblePublic

But still, even allowing for the vagueness implicit in that type of
measurement, 500 million lines of code is insane. Let’s be generous and
say that a single programmer can conceive, write, and debug 100 lines of
code in an 8 hour work day (for applications of this complexity, the
number is usually much, much lower). That’s 5 million coding
worker-days. Throw 1000 coders at it and you’re looking at 20 years to
develop it. No. Just no.

Now this isn’t to say that the thing isn’t likely bloated all to
hell… but 500 million lines of code is bullsh*t. No way is that right.
Augustus Yuan

Would love to StackOverflow on this chart 😉
http://duncanlock.net/ Duncan Lock

Do the Debian and OS X numbers include the user-land software, as well as the OS – they look like they probably do? Also debian ships multiple kernels and a whole ton of optional stuff that would never/could never be installed on one machine at once – is this figure for the debian project as a whole?
JackWayne

35 years as a programmer and it’s well known to me that contract developers are the worst programmers. Support programmers end up rewriting the code to make it workable and extendible.
Noneya Biness

Obviously the 500 million line of code stat is a total crock. They probably billed this failure out based on lines of code and then massively inflated the estimate in order to soak the taxpayers.
Perv Lil

We are going to need a bigger graph.
James P. Steiner

Those numbers seem really huge. Are we sure this is actually lines of code, and not, say, esti-magic-ed lines of code based on compiled size? And not estimated lines of code based on the size of the distribution / installed files? Which is to say, do the numbers for Windows and Office reflect only code, or does this include the size of the bundled media, i.e. sounds, clip art, help files, etc etc? Cuz they ain’t lines of code.
Glen Duncan

These numbers are total bullshit. As an example, a fresh Windows Vista installs uses 15+ GB of disk, while a fresh Tiger install only uses 6.6GB. Are we to believe that Tiger’s alleged 85 MILLION lines of code compiles down 56% smaller than Vista’s 50 Million? Is the author counting likes of *CODE*, or counting lines of comments as well?

The assertion that *any* modern car has anything approaching 100 MILLION lines of code is laughable. While it’s true that modern cars have numerous microcontrollers, they number at most a few dozen. Most microcontrollers of this type have less than much less than 64K of RAM. Assuming that a single line of code produces 5 bytes of machine code, 100 Million lines would require on the order of 7,800 of these largeish microcontrollers @64K to hold it all. Even if 90% that code were in a larger system like integrated nav, that would be still be close to 1000 individual processors. No car has that.
- Aaron
  
  Your comment about lines of code relating to install size is completely inaccurate. Most of both those install size figures comes from assets such as bitmaps. I’d be willing to bet that the entire “code base” of Windows and any version of iOS compile down to under a couple GB. Also, lines of code doesn’t really relate to executable size very well, different compiler settings can have a drastic effect on executable size. You also throw in the fact that they are on different platforms, comparing the total install size just doesn’t make any sense.
  
  As far as the modern car thing, it does seem a bit high, but it could be somewhat accurate. You have to consider all the software that cars use now (almost every car has GPS navigation, maybe some onstar support, etc). They are probably all in self contained systems and operating systems, so you probably have a ton of duplicate code.
- willbest
  
  I suppose it depends on what you consider a line of code for example
  
  // yada yada yada
  // yada yada yada
  
  if (A>B)
  {
  return Z;
  }
  
  vs say
  
  if (A>B) return Z; // yada yada
  
  —
  
  Also are you sure that 8 GB extra you get with Vista is all the operating system and not thousands of preloaded drivers and the like.
  
  —
  Lastly, compiler and hardware optimization can make a huge difference in the size of your binary files from source code. Apple has an advantage in that its entire process is vertically integrated.
Oto Godfrey

Not sure if a modern day vehicle (apart from navigation system) has 100 million lines of code. It is much more simple than a F22.
Edo

Minecraft! (How original i know, but still information is beautiful 😉 )
Phil Winkel

Plot Twist: Obama wrote the code single handedly overnight
A.

How about Debian 7.x ?
MeMadMax

Dead and bloated government creates dead and bloated software…

Wow, who would’ve guessed???
http://www.meadiciona.com/charles_anjos Charles Albert

waitwaitwait so this is saying that a website has actually around 500 million lines of code? how’s that even possible?