Comment by JCTheDenthog
4 days ago
The entire Linux kernel is about 40 million LoC, and only something like 16 million LoC after you remove drivers. I have a hard time imagining whatever OpenAI was talking about there having anywhere close to 6% as much utility as the Linux kernel, despite having 6% as many lines of code. And I have a hard time imagining it's anywhere close to maintainable, regardless of how powerful their LLMs might be.
To be fair, few things of any number of LOC have as much utility as the Linux kernel, and it's also a particularly dense example of code. There's plenty of other examples that have higher LOC / utility ratio without being vibe coded. For example, Google's monorepo famously has 2 billion LOC, which is a statistic I've heard long before LLM coding took over.
Clarification: Google claimed to have 2 billion lines of code in their repo ten years ago, and a commit rate of 50,000 changelists per day, both on exponential growth trends.
That's a monorepo with hundreds if not thousands of different applications. It's not even close to an apples to apples comparison.
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The Linux kernel is not in any way at top of big projects. A kernel, as the name suggests, deals with specific issues and tries to remain small.
The world’s biggest software is usually built over endless adapters of different data and a need to reconcile endless edge cases with laws, regulations and real world complexities.
Chrome has 50 mil LoC
https://openhub.net/p/chrome/analyses/latest/languages_summa...
Chrome is basically reinventing each OS API and libraries. One day they’ll have their own tcp stack and packet filter.
It kinda makes sense given that one of their major products is a computer that runs an operating system literally called ChromeOS.
Arguably with QUIC it already does.
Chrome still has a way to go until Zawinski's Law is satisfied natively.
http://www.catb.org/jargon/html/Z/Zawinskis-Law.html
When I was young, I remember a (joke) program from a book or magazine, called something like report writer or something. It was written in basic and you typed it in.
You would run it and it would say:
how many pages? _
You would type in a number, and it would generate that many pages of a complex-sounding report.
something like "the subsystem design interface is ..." blah blah
similar?