Lines of Code Plotted over Time of Some Large and Some Small Projects

This article contains a chart of code line statistics over time extracted from a set of popular and less known git repositories. The git repositories are read with a script and each tag (release/version) is checked out and analyzed. If there are too few tags or versions (< 20), then for each beginning of a month the current commit is checked out analyzed. For each of these commit trees, the number of lines of code is determined with cloc (version 1.85).

Of course one can argue about whether lines of code is a useful metric at all. Depending on programming language and style the density of code will vary a lot. Furthermore, many projects over time have accidentally or purposefully included external library code (e.g. boost or similar packages) which greatly inflates their metric. And of course long source code may not actually accomplish much compared to a small algorithmic code. Nevertheless I believe the lines of code still somewhat valuable to compare the amount of developer time spent on the open-source projects.

You can add lines of code series of the following projects by clicking on the buttons. All projects were last updated on 2019-11-22.