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Comment by yanw | Hacker News Reader

Chromium uses a different multi-process architecture ... and supporting multiple architectures over the years has led to increasing complexity ... we anticipate that we’ll be able to remove 7 build systems and delete more than 7,000 files—comprising more than 4.5 million lines

How is that not engineering based?

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Last time I measured (late 2012) the entire mozilla-central repository was 4.488 million lines of code. So I don't believe that by simply streamlining things they'll be able to remove anything like 4.5 million lines. Perhaps an extra zero got inserted somewhere.

4.5 million lines spread over 7,000 files is only ~642 lines per file, so I doubt there is an extra zero. Perhaps they included whitespace and comments in their count.

Not sure why this is got downvoted given that it appears to be correct (https://github.com/mozilla/mozilla-central/graphs/code-frequ...)

> Last time I measured (late 2012) the entire mozilla-central repository was 4.488 million lines of code.

Mozilla isn't WebKit.

> I don't believe that by simply streamlining things they'll be able to remove anything like 4.5 million lines.

I suppose you could compare WebKit repos against Blink repos once the latter is live to see exactly what is cut, but I'm going to say the people working on the code that are the source of the count know how many LOC are involved, and that there direct count is more reliable than a third-party estimate based on a different browser's repo.

http://www.ohloh.net/p/WebKit claims that WebKit is 4,825,108 LOC.

http://www.ohloh.net/p/mozilla claims that Mozilla is 11,614,049 lines of code.

Hmm. Not sure what to make of that, but the "we're removing 4.5 MLOC" claim still sounds ridiculous.

Seems a very odd part of the announcement to question. Why wouldn't they know the real number?

I think the implication is that most of the code they are removing is not actually code, but boilerplate/machine-generated build scripts/etc. Still, the number of LOC involved has little bearing on whether or not splitting from WebKit is a good idea.

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