8 ms·

Counterexample: the Linux kernel.

• teacup50 10y ago
  Which has succeeded in spite of being a hot, churning mess.
• zardeh 10y ago
  Which leads to problems: see systemd. Also, to be clear, Linux is relatively small compared to Google or Microsoft, or indeed many corporations codebases. Someone could conceivably read the entire Linux kernel codebase. That's not true for BigCorp.
  • unixhero 10y ago
    I beg to differ. https://youtu.be/yVpbFMhOAwE https://youtu.be/yVpbFMhOAwE
    • zardeh 10y ago
      Right, a single book has on the order of 4-500 pages, longer ones have more, but we'll take the average, and an average book has....30 lines of text per page, so 13500 lines per book. That makes the kernel ~1000 books, which is a lot of books, but avid readers do read 50+ books per year (my father probably does close to double this). That makes reading the entire source absolutely possible, in the order of 10s of years, which is a long time, but then, the kernel has been around for what, 25 now? So there are a number of maintainers who have been around long enough to have read through the entire kernel. Compare that to google, where[1] there are almost as many unique source files as the kernel has lines (though to be fair, many are autogenerated). [1]: http://cacm.acm.org/magazines/2016/7/204032-why-google-stores-billions-of-lines-of-code-in-a-single-repository/fulltext http://cacm.acm.org/magazines/2016/7/204032-why-google-store...