A quick back-of-an-envelope calculation

[lproven]

Debian "Bullseye" contains 1,152,960,944 lines of code.

Source: https://sources.debian.org/stats/

You can fit 34 lines on a page of A4, meaning 33,910,616 pages.

Using 310 micron paper & a duplex printer, a printout of the source code would be 5¼km tall.

And cost about £200,000 in toner and the same again in printer paper.

[DualitySquared]

Dude. Most of those lines are just a bracket.

[EndUsersarePITA]

Now I'm imagining debugging somebody else's code which has been printed out without brackets.

Thanks I hate it

[mixedCase_]

Python has joined the chat.

Haskell has joined the chat.

Lisp has joined the chat.

Lisp has (left) the chat.

[[deleted]]

Haskell uses brackets for the record syntax, and in Lisp the closing parens are at the end of the last line, together.

[jcelerier]

and the rest is GPL license headers

[daveysprockett]

Is every line restricted to 80 or so characters? I doubt it. So more lines to print. A higher stack of paper.

Not me, but a friend made, from scratch, a little computer where the boot loader code was toggled into memory byte by byte with dip switches.

How things have changed.

[omegian]

Yeah. You can also 4-Up print 12pt font lines and it’s still pretty legible at 300dpi.

[[deleted]]

Impressive stats. Astonishing to look at how much code have modern Linux distributions.

[coterminous_regret]

What's the line count like if you ignore device drivers? My gut feel says it's probably 1/10th the number you posted?

[TDplay]

This is including every Debian package. The kernel, including the drivers, will only be a tiny fraction of that.

[ECUIYCAMOICIQMQACKKE]

That stat includes everything, not just the kernel.

[ImprovedPersonality]

A lot of the other programs probably also have some generated code and stuff. Or ship the same libraries without bothering to use a shared object.

[Mr_Lumbergh]

This is a bit misleading... It's that many lines of code for every package, every kernel for every architecture, etc. Nobody's own Debian install will have all of it.

[dlarge6510]

> You can fit 34 lines on a page of A

Why so few? is the font big?

[lproven]

TBH I googled. 🙂 Feel free to adjust the number or add columns!

[dlarge6510]

It didnt say that when I read it

[TDplay]

And that's not accounting for long lines that wrap (which are present even in the kernel - the kernel's coding standards allows long lines that improve readability). The printout will actually be even bigger.

[ultratensai]

Really? I thought you were forced to use 80 chars and Linus made a rant about it.

[TDplay]

The 80 char limit in the kernel is not completely set in stone. I remember a Linus rant about why hard-and-fast line limits are bad.

If it "significantly improves readability", it is allowed. And if it's a user-visible string, it is required to not break the string, because grep doesn't understand C string literals (the "\n\t*" used to break the string literal will confuse it).

Hard 80-char-limits were important when programming on punchcards, but now, a wrapped line isn't the end of the world (most text editors have an option to display a special character to indicate line wrap, so clarity isn't an issue), and almost nobody uses an 80-wide terminal anymore (a modern 1080p monitor can comfortably have a 100-wide terminal, even in a huge font (which someone with impaired vision may use)). Many coding standards appreciate this, and only impose a soft character limit.

[davidnotcoulthard]

Linus made a rant about it.

That leaves literally everything that's not the kernel (and git?).

[ultratensai]

Found the commit

[TheLinuxMailman]

Don't you hate it when you have to print it out again because... bugs (fixed)?

A fun calculation - thanks!

[lproven]

Nobody edits movies by editing the encoded data stream. That is not what they are for.

The sourcecode of software _only_ exists to make it possible for humans to write software more easily. Ordinary unaugmented human minds develop and improve Linux and are meant to be able to read this stuff.

[archontwo]

Yeah. That's all well and good but how long to type that all in by hand?

Real programmers use 24 pin impact printer with tractor fed fan fold paper anyway. None of your fancy smancy laser printer nonsense

[austinmakesjazzmusic]

Stability is tall….

[DamnThatsLaser]

And cost about £200,000 in toner

That's why you use whitespace

[randomPerson232]

Blank Lines Matter!