"I've heard it said for years that studies show the number of bugs grows roughly linearly with code size and that this holds true across any programming languag

"I've heard it said for years that studies show the number of bugs grows roughly linearly with code size and that this holds true across any programming language." I have absolutely no reason to doubt this, but I suspect this does not look deeply enough at the process. Bugs, normally, get fixed, especially towards the end of a project, and it is much easier to eradicate bugs, and verify eradication, in a small project, than it is in a large one. Poor bug-fixing, in the late stages of a large, buggy project, may well introduce further bugs, as well as discovering latent bugs, masked by the original ones.