Computer Code an Increasingly Precious E.V. Commodity | Hacker News Reader

Computer Code an Increasingly Precious E.V. Commodity

nytimes.com

11 pointsgetpost10 comments

"While the French carmaker, which has a partnership with Nissan, maker of the Leaf, has said no crucial technology leaked, the stakes in automotive intellectual property are high, experts say. And the valuables are not blueprints or styling sketches, but the huge volume of computer instructions required by these cars: the Chevrolet Volt plug-in hybrid uses about 10 million lines of computer code to shunt power seamlessly among the car’s battery pack, power inverter, drive motor, gas engine, generator and other subsystems.

By comparison, Boeing’s new 787 Dreamliner relies on a mere eight million lines of code."

Linux is ~4 million lines of code[1].

I have trouble even conceptualizing how that much code can ever be usefully conceived or maintained. Obviously, it's possible. I just don't get it on a practical level. Can anyone explain?

On a different vane, given the apparent impracticality of keeping code secret, and the enormous undertaking that is required to develop this kind of software, wouldn't it be better (lower cost & better quality & short lead time) just to open source it, and have a platform that can be used by different auto manufacturers? Can't we all just get along?

[1] http://msquaredtechnologies.com/m2rsm/rsm_software_project_m...

It can't possibly be true that the software of the Volt is 10 million lines.

First, it's not a reasonable amount of code for the task at hand. 10 million lines to monitor various sensors, and to control various systems? Really?

Second, it's not reasonable that any team could have produced that much code in this time. How long has the Volt been under production? A few years? You'd need a huge team to just crank out that amount of code in that time, and it would be of atrocious quality.

It's gotta be a journalistic exaggeration of some kind.

(Lines of code / car) * number of cars = total lines of code

Right? Right?

what kind of code? Assembly? Could be 10mm lines.

They might be counting branches in source control as completely separate code bases. There could easily be 100k lines with 100 branches, for experimental changes, different cars, production freezes etc.

Open source it? Are you joking? We're talking about an industry with a history in jealously guarding secrets. They will give away nothing and collaborate in nothing. In their eyes, open source is preposterous.

Besides, if something goes wrong, who will be blamed?

The very thought that a plane relies on that much code to fly let alone a car almost worries me. Working on code pretty much all day myself I'm envisioning all the things that can go wrong in that large of a codebase and shudder a little. I'm flying out tomorrow for a trip so I'm just going to pretend I didn't even read that line :-)

4 January 2011 - Linux 2.6.37 was released (13,996,612 lines of code).[16]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linux_kernel

Any idea how many lines of code it takes to get to the moon, or LEO? Can we agree that at least, at a conceptual level, a moon shot is more complex than whatever the Boeing 787 or the Chevy Volt is doing?

Cheap shot: are they including test cases from code Oracle currently owns that are not actually distributed/run in each car?

a code for a moon shot is probably actually simpler than flying a jet or driving a car (at least in 1969)

your out of the atmosphere in a few ten seconds (if you havn't exploded yet) and then there is very little to interfere with you (vaccum, earth gravity, moon gravity)

however, cars and airplanes are constantly interacting with their complex, messy environment.

clearly, the 10,000,000 lines of code figure includes the operating system.

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