According to the Open Hub website, Linux has 37,016,567 lines of code, but this is small compared to NetBSD and OpenBSD, which have 72,065,568 and 81,902,070 lines of code, respectively.

Is there a reason why Linux has fewer lines of code compared to NetBSD and OpenBSD? I'd like to know.

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[–] mech@feddit.org 68 points 3 months ago (1 children)

You're comparing a kernel with an entire operating system.

[–] vext01 12 points 3 months ago

This.

[–] mrus 34 points 3 months ago

Your numbers don't check out, please provide sources. The Linux Kernel has around 40 million lines, the OpenBSD kernel around 7. You might have mistakenly counted OpenBSD/NetBSD as a whole system (the base installation), instead of solely the kernel.

[–] DFX4509B@lemmy.wtf 10 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago)

Given BSD is supposed to be a complete package while Linux has a separate kernel and userland, that's probably part of why.

[–] beutlin@feddit.org 3 points 3 months ago

Doesn't mean anything. Lines of Code is a stupid metric because it's just an absolute count. Not relative to any implemented functions, not imaging the actual density. Especially stupid because you can easily tweak the count by bloating a function.

[–] ryannathans@aussie.zone 1 points 3 months ago (1 children)

You're probabry including ports/ which contains all the software available for the platform

[–] strlcpy 2 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago)

Those are just the packaging makefiles etc though, not the actual software sources (with some notable exceptions for bootstrapping, at least in NetBSD). Still it's comparing a kernel with an OS

[–] xylogx@lemmy.world 1 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago)

Is that more than the kernel? How much more?

[–] PanArab@lemmy.ml 0 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago)

This is why I typically refer to it as GNU+Linux and not just Linux. Two different and incompatible operating systems can use the same kernel just look at Android and GNU+Linux. Each of the BSDs is a complete operating system (userland + kernel).

[–] steeznson@lemmy.world 0 points 3 months ago

One reason is that the coreutils in Linux use a lot of hacky or hard to read tricks to improve performance. OpenBSD explicitly wanted to make their source code more legible. FWIW I prefer the Linux approach.