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>From Visual Studio Blog it is known that the source code for Visual Studio 2012, formerly known as Visual Studio 11, consists of about 50 million lines of code. And despite this fact new release contains lots of new features and improvements.

Wow, 50 million lines of code is completely earth shattering to a student like myself who has only dealt with line counts that were five digits long.

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Interestingly, I believe this is roughly the same size (in LOC) as Eclipse (counting the entire release train), give or take a few million.

I don't have any specific knowledge about VS, but most giant software projects (including Eclipse) with LOC counts in the millions don't exist as singular projects - rather, they are made up of lots of smaller, loosely coupled projects with generally well-defined integration points.

It certainly isn't easy - defining those APIs in a way that their surface area is the correct size is insanely difficult - but it does make managing projects of this size at least manageable.

What a strange thing for the article to say. Is the implication that once you hit 50 million lines it becomes impossible to add new features?

I don't know, keeping such a huge code base simple enough to be able to add new features without breaking stuff sounds indeed amazing to me.

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