Development quotes of the week

[Posted April 19, 2017 by ris]

The cURL project consists of roughly 100 thousand lines of C code according to Ohloh. If we assume that converting it to a some other language is just as easy as converting simple Perl to Python (which seems unlikely), the conversion would take 1000 person hours. At 8 hours per day that comes to around 5 months of full time work. Once that is done you get to port all the changes made in trunk since starting the conversion. Halting the entire project while converting it from one language to another is not an option.

This gives us a clear answer on why people don't just convert their projects from one language to another:

There is no such thing as "just rewrite it in X".

— Jussi Pakkanen

Just as the way people join an open source project sets the tone of its future involvement, the way people leave a project sets the tone of the project for those that continue with it.

— Gareth J. Greenaway

100K lines?!?!!

Posted Apr 21, 2017 16:02 UTC (Fri) by psoberoi (subscriber, #45666) [Link] (1 responses)

cURL consists of 100 thousand lines of code? But why?

100K lines?!?!!

Posted Apr 21, 2017 16:35 UTC (Fri) by excors (subscriber, #95769) [Link]

It supports about twenty network protocols, some of which take a few thousand lines of code each. It has wrappers to let it build against a dozen different SSL libraries on different platforms. It has a couple of hundred command-line options to support. No individual feature is particularly huge, it's just a lot of small ones adding up.