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Comment by aaronbrethorst | Hacker News Reader

Wait, what? 3 million lines of XML. Oh yuck yuck yuck.

Beyond that, I'm surprised there's more C than Java, and doubly surprised that C++ comes in behind all of the aforementioned languages.

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Much of the XML may be generated stuff? Does this include the kernel, which would be C?

According to Wikipedia the full linux 2.6 kernel tree is now around 12 million LOC. So I'd be guessing a good chunk of the 2.8 million lines of C in Android is the kernel. It'd really depend on how many lines the "core" parts of the kernel take up (not that much, I bet) but also how much is left in the Android tree even if it's not really used or even compiled in.

I'm also interested to know what makes up all that XML, though.

You're right. XML is about 25% of the code (~3M of ~12M lines, ignoring blank lines). And overall, some 20% of the project is comments (~3M comments of ~15M lines code + comment, again ignoring blank lines). And in spite of that, they appear to have several small things with no comments whatsoever. Most of the other stuff is about what you'd expect, though: the header files and assembly have the most comments, while the one-off programs have very few.

Still, I wonder what they used Lisp for? Or why they used so many different tools? I mean, Perl was all but made to replace awk & sed. Did they have several people who did little one-off tasks in their favorite language when they were pressed for time?

Must be nice to get the tools you want, though, instead of being subject to absurd decisions by superiors (think "Daily WTF material").

The Android robot to McCarthy: You get 144 lines to write in lisp. What would you like to write?

McCarthy to the Android robot: Umm. Curse out the other languages for being cheap knockoffs.

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