5 ms·

~$5k for 7 KLOC of bug free C code is a steal, that's impossible to do in less than a couple of months

kragen 15y ago
It's nearly impossible to do in any timeframe. I can think of perhaps two examples in human history where I think it's been done: qmail and seL4. And there may still be bugs in qmail. There may be a few other non-public projects that have achieved less than one bug per 7000 lines of C, but probably not more than one or two.
- fanf2 15y ago
  http://www.dt.e-technik.uni-dortmund.de/~ma/qmail-bugs http://www.dt.e-technik.uni-dortmund.de/~ma/qmail-bugs There are also some DNS-related bugs that are not on this list.
  - kragen 15y ago
    Thanks! I hadn't seen those, although I knew of 1.4. I think 1.1, 1.3, and 1.4 are actual bugs, if the reports are accurate; I'm pretty sure Dan disagreed with Wietse about 1.1. Three bugs in about 15000 lines of code doesn't quite rise to the level of less than one bug per 7000 lines of code, so maybe that's only been done once, in seL4. What are the DNS-related bugs?
abcd_f 15y ago
Beg to differ on both points. Ignoring the 7 KLOC metric (which is fairly useless in estimating the project value for the customer), $5K at $100/h rate of a senior C programmer on a contract works out to about 6 working days, which is a reasonable timeframe for writing well optimized XML-RPC protocol parser. In other words it's neither a steal nor does it take two months to write. (edit) YMMV by a programmer, but that's what it would've taken me to write it (though I have written a good deal of protocol parsers).
- jpr 15y ago
  1+KLOCs a day of C? WTF?
  - abcd_f 15y ago
    It does not need to be 1 KLOC/day :) The complexity of XML-RPC parser is about a week of work for polished code. Go from there, not from the given 7 KLOC of some implementation.
  - rdouble 15y ago
    Compared to other languages, C is pretty straightforward. You also have to write more of it to do less. I switched back to C after 12 years of using web scripting languages, and am surprised at how much more code I churn out per day.
    - z92 15y ago
      Do you now use C for web apps? Like parsing GET, POST, DB, Cookies?

It's nearly impossible to do in any timeframe. I can think of perhaps two examples in human history where I think it's been done: qmail and seL4. And there may still be bugs in qmail. There may be a few other non-public projects that have achieved less than one bug per 7000 lines of C, but probably not more than one or two.

fanf2 15y ago
http://www.dt.e-technik.uni-dortmund.de/~ma/qmail-bugs http://www.dt.e-technik.uni-dortmund.de/~ma/qmail-bugs There are also some DNS-related bugs that are not on this list.
- kragen 15y ago
  Thanks! I hadn't seen those, although I knew of 1.4. I think 1.1, 1.3, and 1.4 are actual bugs, if the reports are accurate; I'm pretty sure Dan disagreed with Wietse about 1.1. Three bugs in about 15000 lines of code doesn't quite rise to the level of less than one bug per 7000 lines of code, so maybe that's only been done once, in seL4. What are the DNS-related bugs?

abcd_f 15y ago

Beg to differ on both points. Ignoring the 7 KLOC metric (which is fairly useless in estimating the project value for the customer), $5K at $100/h rate of a senior C programmer on a contract works out to about 6 working days, which is a reasonable timeframe for writing well optimized XML-RPC protocol parser. In other words it's neither a steal nor does it take two months to write. (edit) YMMV by a programmer, but that's what it would've taken me to write it (though I have written a good deal of protocol parsers).

jpr 15y ago
1+KLOCs a day of C? WTF?
- abcd_f 15y ago
  It does not need to be 1 KLOC/day :) The complexity of XML-RPC parser is about a week of work for polished code. Go from there, not from the given 7 KLOC of some implementation.
- rdouble 15y ago
  Compared to other languages, C is pretty straightforward. You also have to write more of it to do less. I switched back to C after 12 years of using web scripting languages, and am surprised at how much more code I churn out per day.
  - z92 15y ago
    Do you now use C for web apps? Like parsing GET, POST, DB, Cookies?