Lines by C vs Rust

Posted Feb 10, 2026 19:23 UTC (Tue) by NYKevin (subscriber, #129325)
In reply to: Lines by C vs Rust by koverstreet
Parent article: Development statistics for 6.19

On top of that, the fact that the Rust-for-Linux folks decided to vendor syn rather strongly implies they are making significant use of proc macros (syn is mostly if not solely used for implementing proc macros). That probably cuts down on the line count by quite a lot, since Rust proc macros are a great deal more expressive than C preprocessor macros.

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Lines by C vs Rust

Posted Feb 11, 2026 7:23 UTC (Wed) by taladar (subscriber, #68407) [Link] (1 responses)

Might be interesting to have a graph of post macro-expansion C and Rust code numbers too.

I suspect having a culture of using derive macros for many common tasks also helps keep the line count low in Rust.

Lines by C vs Rust

Posted Feb 11, 2026 15:31 UTC (Wed) by mathstuf (subscriber, #69389) [Link]

C macros expand to a single line, so you'd need to filter through a formatter first. You might also want to trim dead derive code from Rust as well…lots of tedious error handling going on there when I've looked (e.g., `Deserialize`).