I was chatting with one of the NetBeans guys the other day and he said “BTW, it’s up to 6.7 million lines of code now”. Gack. Here is their public schedule. Wish them luck... the thought of managing a code-base like that makes my flesh crawl.
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From: John Cowan (May 28 2007, at 22:09)
On flesh-crawling (since comments are closed there): Goosebumps are basically horripilations, the same thing cats (or porcupines, for that matter) do when they want to look big and threatening and bristle up their fur or quills. Human body hair is too short and sparse to have much of a visual effect, but we still have the machinery.
This is a good example of how not everything in an organism is directly selected for. Some things are vestigial survivals, some are free riders that come along with useful features, some are simply irrelevant to selection.
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From: David Van Couvering (May 30 2007, at 16:31)
Gack, indeed, it made me nervous too. But I have been working with it for six months now, and it is amazingly manageable. How? I'm not sure yet, but I think some key pieces are: a modular architecture, a solid build system, and a very strong architectural discipline. You actually get an email sent to the dev list if something gets checked in that breaks the compatibility of an API!
I think the biggest piece is the strong modular architecture. You really can build your piece independent of the rest of the system. Without this, I think NetBeans would sink under its own weight.
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