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Comment by throwatdem12311 | Hacker News Reader

100k lines is tiny what are you on about, especially in the monolithic app sass world where many Fyll stack apps that handle all business ops are probably written with Django.

Our entire business runs on 300k lines of Ruby (on Rails) and I can keep most of the business logic in my head. I would say our codebase is not exactly “tiny” and just cracking the ceiling into “smal” territory. And comparatively, people probably write even less code in equivalent rails apps to django ones. 100k lines of C++ is miniscule.

Obviously “deleting code” in this context doesn’t mean purging version control history but the current state of the codebase.

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> 100k lines is tiny

No, no, it is not, or at least not in my experience (I do not and never have done web development - medium performance C++ code - I don't see how I could write, understand and support 100K lines of code in this area).

And so, what does your Ruby code actually do?

Your experience doesn't match mine. I have, mostly solo, and part time, written multiple codebases that on that kind of magnitude (it is about the level where it still will fit in one person's head pretty easily IMO). It doesn't take much to reach that kind of size. Now, if all of it was super dense and subtle code, then yeah, that would be a lot, but in my experience that's usually a pretty small part of any given codebase.

> in my experience that's usually a pretty small part of any given codebase

Our experiences differ then. Mine is that almost all of the code I write is directly targeted on the usually quite complex problem I am trying to solve. I don't do boilerplate, for example.

I tend not to have much boilerplate (and write abstractions to avoid it), but I do still find there tends to be a lot of supporting code around the 'difficult bits' (TBH, most of the code I write is supporting a small amount of relatively simple but subtle operations, but such is the nature of embedded software). But different codebases are quite different in this regard: this is why such different scales shouldn't be too surprising in different domains.

100k lines is huge, I don't know what these jokers are on

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