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> 10kSLOC for the entire universe It is the nature of idealists that they see the world idealized. Smalltalk-80 itself has nearly 30 kSLOC (the low-level code
by Rochus 4y ago
> 10kSLOC for the entire universe
It is the nature of idealists that they see the world idealized. Smalltalk-80 itself has nearly 30 kSLOC (the low-level code for the VM adds another 5 to 10 kSLOC); it's just more difficult to count, but I wrote tools which can do it (https://github.com/rochus-keller/Smalltalk/ https://github.com/rochus-keller/Smalltalk/).
- recuter 4y agoNot at all being idealistic, this is a hard problem. But if we're really going to compare stuff.. Systemd alone is over 1 million lines. Probably X/Wayland as well. And the not-slim QT is probably going to end up over 1 million lines soon enough. There is a reason why this slim version exists. That's at least two orders of magnitude difference in complexity. Maybe there's no getting around it but one has got to wonder whether things went horribly wrong somewhere.
- robinsonb5 4y agoOh they definitely went horribly wrong somewhere. And I suspect that shared sense is the reason so many alternative, niche, minimalist and retro projects are springing up. Personally I'm keeping a close eye on Haiku and SerenityOS as potential ports in the storm of ever-taller Jenga towers of dependencies and complexity...
- Rochus 4y agoWell, to be fair Qt Core, Gui and Widgets can du much more than ST-80; there are more platform abstractions, things like threads and unicode, more and more powerful widgets, more powerful font and 2d drawing, etc.; it's not just the same functionality with a different number of SLOC. For the people who are comfortable with even less, it's worth comparing it to the 1991 Ceres Oberon System, which has less than 14 kSLOC including the compiler and TUI.
- smackmybishop 4y agoI suspect they're referring to VPRI's STEPS research, not Smalltalk. (And it was a target of 20k, not 10k.)