Re: [9fans] OT: linux complexity trends

[Dan Cross <cross@math.psu.edu>]

In article <20011126130655.879E819A2E@mail.cse.psu.edu> you write:
>on the other hand, i think rob observed once years ago at a conference that at
>the time the entire source code of the Plan 9 kernel was smaller than
>just the include files of some Unix systems, and i don't think that has
>changed significantly.

A little while back, I did an experiment.  I stripped out all comments
and blank lines, and counted the number of lines in the linux kernel which
contain all or part of a C statement or expression, minus device drivers.
The total was something like 1.6M.  Then, I performed the same experiment
on the entire Plan 9 distribution (which includes things like ghostscript),
plus TeX, mosml, and cvs.  If I recall correctly, the result of that was
something like 1.5M lines.  Maybe source lines is not a good indicator of
complexity, but I found something there really amusing.

	- Dan C.