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Comment by kasperni | Hacker News Reader

> the only scalable software development methodology is open source

Some companies such as Microsoft, Google, Amazon would disagree.

The Linux kernel had 20k contributors since its inception, you’d be hard pressed to find those numbers for a single project at any company.

Yes, the linux kernel is a big codebase but so are a lot of others [1]. And you will find lots of private companies not mentioned that have long-standing projects with >10 mil LOC.

If you took the 100 biggest code bases in the world. I would be surprised if more than 10% of them were open source.

[1] https://www.informationisbeautiful.net/visualizations/millio...

I know a medium sized French-American multinational. You've probably not even heard of it. A decade ago they had multiple products that had several million lines of code. Their entire platforms probably had 100 million. I can't even imagine how many contributors they had, the oldest project was started in the 80's and it probably had 1000 contributors over time, at least.

And again, that's for a middle size company you haven't even heard of. FAANG, Microsoft, Oracle, IBM for sure will have stuff dwarfing that.

Someone from oracle posted here a while ago, where they described Oracle 12.2 has 25 million lines of C https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18442941

And yet it's a less appealing product than Postgres.

An explosion on the number of lines of code is one of the way development teams fail.

Is it actually less appealing? My understanding is that DBAs consider Oracle very good, just very (very) expensive. This also lines up with my experience tuning queries against Oracle vs Postgres backends. The folk wisdom seems, to me, to be Postgres is 99% as good in the common cases and 90-95% as good in the difficult cases.

Oracle DBAs consider Oracle clearly superior. SQL Server DBAs that know all the ways to optimize SQL Servers consider SQL Server clearly superior. I don't know of any PostgreSQL DBA, just generalists that work with Postgres, so I don't know about them.

The truth is that Oracle is ridden with coherence bugs, and have a much worse performance picture out of the box than Postgres. But while improving the Postgres performance requires deep digging into the DBMS itself, Oracle has a lot you can optimize just on the SQL interface. But there are plenty of cases where Oracle just can not become as fast as out of the box Postgres, and many where it could in theory, but a bug prevents you from doing things right.

Overall, three is no definitive ordering on the speed of the "good 3" DBMS. It always depends on what you are doing.

SAP told me their framework is a billion LoC of Java and 30k tables in the database. That was years ago so it has probably grown further. It is only the framework, so no useful application yet.

How many of those 20k contributors worked on drivers, and how many - on the actual core (~150kloc)? Every driver is like a separate subproject, having 20k people work on hundreds/thousands of drivers (unrelated to each other) wouldn't sound as impressive.

That's the scary thing. How many real, core contributors does even something like the Linux kernel have? People who have actually written more than a couple patches that landed and stayed in the kernel. I'd be astounded if it's much more than a hundred.

Most open-source projects have one to maybe five real contributors, outside the drive-by pull requests to fix some bug.

I guess (and I have no way to verify this, it's really just a guess) that the number of developers that worked on the Windows code base in its 35 year history is in the same order, if not higher.

Consider the bit at the end of this blog post:

https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20180326-00/?p=98...

Bonus chatter: In a discussion of Windows source control, one person argued that git works great on large projects and gave an example of a large git repo: “For example, the linux kernel repository at roughly eight years old is 800–900MB in size, has about 45,000 files, and is considered to have heavy churn, with 400,000 commits.”

I found that adorable. You have 45,000 files. Yeah, call me when your repo starts to get big. The Windows repo has over three million files.

Four hundred thousand commits over eight years averages to around [130] commits per day. This is heavy churn? That’s so cute.

You know what we call a day with [130] commits? “Catastrophic network outage.”

To get closer to an apples-to-apples comparison, it'd be necessary to know whether the commit counts in each case include all development branches for all development groups. By design, git-based development can be highly distributed.

Also, even if we normalized both cases for 'code files only' and/or 'kernel code only', there could still be architectural, code style, and development process differences that lead to different metrics for each project.

He's really not selling Microsoft as a fun place to work, is he?

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