Is healthcare.gov really 500 million lines?
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Is healthcare.gov really 500 million lines?
1–10 of 15 posts
Re: Is healthcare.gov really 500 million lines?
#2There's probably 490 million lines of comments explaining all the quid pro quos needed to get the thing built.
Re: Is healthcare.gov really 500 million lines?
#3No freaking way. 500 people can't write 1 million lines of code in 7 months. Maybe if you counted some kind of ORM generated code but even that seems ridiculous. Even 500 MB of code doesn't make any sense.
Re: Is healthcare.gov really 500 million lines?
#4There's probably 490 million lines of comments explaining all the quid pro quos needed to get the thing built.
The quote was "According to one specialist, the Web site contains about 500 million lines of software code."
So I would highly doubt that "software code" would also include comments.
Re: Is healthcare.gov really 500 million lines?
#5I'm in the video game industry working on AAA console titles, and the last game I worked on sits right around a million lines for the runtime executable, and maybe another 1-2 million for all the supporting toolchains.
I worked on a game once that was about 4 million lines, and it had continuously evolved for about a decade at that point.
If the 500 million line comment is true, it probably counts all the lines in all the supporting documentation, xml configuration files (which could be huge), etc.
I'd bet my life's savings that it's not actually half a billion lines of executable code.
Re: Is healthcare.gov really 500 million lines?
#6Perhaps it was written in the esoteric programming language Whitespace?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whitespace_%28programming_lang...
Re: Is healthcare.gov really 500 million lines?
#7I recall that at least some of the site's code is generated, which can sometimes result in code many times longer than equivalent hand-written code. Still, why would they could the lines of codegen and not the original code?
In any case, the figure seems outrageous. If it is that long, I think the site is doomed, and will have to be rewritten from the top.
Re: Is healthcare.gov really 500 million lines?
#8There's probably 490 million lines of comments explaining all the quid pro quos needed to get the thing built.
The quote was "According to one specialist, the Web site contains about 500 million lines of software code." So I would highly doubt that "software code" would also include comments.
Why would you think that? Most executable code includes lots of comments, unless it's been preprocessed.
Still, I agree the figure is outrageous.
Re: Is healthcare.gov really 500 million lines?
#9On a project I worked on, the government had this idea that we should put an inference engine (essentially an AI) into our software (which ran on a military radio). The idea was that it would be able to process XML-coded regulatory instructions and be able to develop a spectrum-use strategy that followed the appropriate regulations. It added unfathomable complexity, along with a Prolog interpreter, to what was otherwise a tractable system.
My guess is that the "500 million lines," to the extent it isn't pure fiction, is not actual program logic. Rather, it's data files capturing the legal and regulatory distinctions between the 50 states, all the different providers, etc.
Re: Is healthcare.gov really 500 million lines?
#10For comparison, the Linux kernel sits at about 15 million.