
Ask HN: A 787 Dreamliner has less than 1/10th of the code of a modern car. Why? - sanmon3186
Premium class automobile has 100 million lines[1] or of that order, whereas a Boeing’s 787 Dreamliner require less than 1&#x2F;10th of that. LoC is no measure of complexity of a system but it is still an indicator of how much is going on inside. So what is it that an airplane doesn&#x27;t have but a modern car has?<p>[1]http:&#x2F;&#x2F;spectrum.ieee.org&#x2F;transportation&#x2F;systems&#x2F;this-car-runs-on-code<p>* 2009 link but coming from IEEE, I believe it is credible enough.<p>*Not sure if it really qualifies to be Ask HN question
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codeonfire
It says right there in the article. The 787 numbers are for avionics and
flight systems. The number for the car probably includes the entertainment
system, nav system, backup camera, etc all of which runs on some open source
OS with hundreds of packages installed. 787's don't run on large numbers of
open source packages for avionics and flight control.

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mamp
I wonder how many LOC are for dealing with emission tests...

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Peroni
>LoC is no measure of complexity of a system

Agreed but I've often been curious about the complexity myself. I saved a
similar discussion on reddit a few years ago. One commenter worked for a
company that makes Stability Control Systems for major car manufacturers and
this comment really stood out for me:

 _Like, for instance, BMW wants us to follow this architecture standard that
(very simply) requires all function calls between sets of "subsystems" to
route through one file. It is currently at around 120,000 lines. That's one
file out of the thousands of files we have. We have many "database" files that
are thousands to tens of thousands of lines long as well._

