How big is OS X?

mr skillsmr skills
Posted:
in macOS edited January 2014
I've been reading a lot recently about how big the Vista code base is - 60 million lines of code, or so. I'm no programmer; can someone put into perspective how big that is? How many lines of code are there in OSX? How big or small is OSX considered?



And anything else related you think might be interesting ...

Comments

  • Reply 1 of 7
    mr skillsmr skills Posts: 144member
    Example of other interesting things: How big was OS9? OS 1? Which are the 'big' bits of the OS? How big is a big app? How long is a piece of string? How high is a china-man?
  • Reply 2 of 7
    the cool gutthe cool gut Posts: 1,714member
    oops, never mind.
  • Reply 3 of 7
    crampy20crampy20 Posts: 68member
    As storage increases and processors get faster we can use more lines of code and thus more complex programs.



    A big OS or a big program is more likley to be the most advanced out of them all, unless coded horribly.



    OS 1 had to fit inside something like 32 kb



    OS 9 has to fit inside something like 400 mb



    OS X has to fit inside 5 Gb



    As for lines of code of the size of vista.... i dont know
  • Reply 4 of 7
    MarvinMarvin Posts: 15,486moderator
    Code size doesn't always relate to hard drive space. I think Maya is over a million lines of code and it takes up about 300MB. But the core that makes up the actual code is only about 75MB, the rest is just things like media. See when you install the Apple Developer tools (1.5GB I think) - half of it is documentation.



    60 million lines of code is pretty big especially if it goes wrong but the code is split into loads and loads of little modules that each have teams of developers working on.



    OS X is probably of a similar size to Vista. I imagine it would be smaller since it doesn't have to support as wide a range of hardware and being unix based, will be coded better. I think we all know by now to equate M$ to bloat.
  • Reply 5 of 7
    davegeedavegee Posts: 2,765member
    Okay ... if nobody else is gonna say it I'll have to.



    Code size doesn't matter... It's how you use it!
  • Reply 6 of 7
    jumpyspiderjumpyspider Posts: 41member
    Now that OS X will be running on similar hardware to PC's, I think it will be really interesting to see which machines run certain pro apps best.



    What I mean is, if we have something like Photoshop running on two different machines natively (eventually), and the only difference between those machines is the OS, then we might have a good comparison of the efficiency of those OS's and how they impact performance.



    I know it would also come down to how well the apps were compiled for each operating system, but its just a thought.



    Hope that makes sense, am really sleepy, job interview tomorrow.
  • Reply 7 of 7
    theapplegeniustheapplegenius Posts: 584member
    Most of Mac OS X is the Aqua GUI and languages. I think the actual kernel is pretty small.
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