

How many lines of code does it take to create the Android OS - mun411
http://www.gubatron.com/blog/2010/05/23/how-many-lines-of-code-does-it-take-to-create-the-android-os/

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aaronbrethorst
Wait, what? 3 million lines of XML. Oh yuck yuck yuck.

Beyond that, I'm surprised there's more C than Java, and doubly surprised that
C++ comes in behind all of the aforementioned languages.

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robryan
Much of the XML may be generated stuff? Does this include the kernel, which
would be C?

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angusgr
According to Wikipedia the full linux 2.6 kernel tree is now around 12 million
LOC. So I'd be guessing a good chunk of the 2.8 million lines of C in Android
is the kernel. It'd really depend on how many lines the "core" parts of the
kernel take up (not that much, I bet) but also how much is left in the Android
tree even if it's not really used or even compiled in.

I'm also interested to know what makes up all that XML, though.

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Natsu
You're right. XML is about 25% of the code (~3M of ~12M lines, ignoring blank
lines). And overall, some 20% of the project is comments (~3M comments of ~15M
lines code + comment, again ignoring blank lines). And in spite of that, they
appear to have several small things with no comments whatsoever. Most of the
other stuff is about what you'd expect, though: the header files and assembly
have the most comments, while the one-off programs have very few.

Still, I wonder what they used Lisp for? Or why they used so many different
tools? I mean, Perl was all but made to replace awk & sed. Did they have
several people who did little one-off tasks in their favorite language when
they were pressed for time?

Must be nice to get the tools you want, though, instead of being subject to
absurd decisions by superiors (think "Daily WTF material").

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morphir
The Android robot to McCarthy: You get 144 lines to write in lisp. What would
you like to write?

McCarthy to the Android robot: Umm. Curse out the other languages for being
cheap knockoffs.

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terminus
This looks like cumulative lines of code for all the projects that go into
Android (across all the platforms that they are supported on.)

For instance C#, DOS Batch, IDL etc are listed. I don't believe that Android
has a runtime for any of these.

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angusgr
FWIW, I'd be really interested to see this reorganised as LOC per component.

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macrael
A project made up of 12 million lines of code, and Google can give it away for
free. Mind boggling. There's not many can do that.

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CUViper
Well, Google can receive a huge chunk of that for free, add their
contribution, and give that result away. It's still a great thing, but let's
not forget credit for the shoulders they are standing on.

I'd be interested to know the numbers for the parts that are unique to
Android, as well as how much has been added to parts that are not unique...

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chrislloyd
This really puts FONC in perspective.

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bprater
PHP is making a disappointing showing with a whopping 3 LOC!

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xhuang
i think it should be a phpinfo() <?php phpinfo(); ?>

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Keyframe
D?! Which D are we talking about here?

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morphir
The one that comes after C.

