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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 71 points 10 months ago

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

[-] vext01@lemmy.sdf.org 12 points 10 months ago
[-] mrus@lemmy.sdf.org 32 points 10 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 10 months ago* (last edited 10 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 5 points 10 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 10 months ago

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

[-] strlcpy@lemmy.sdf.org 2 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago)

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

[-] xylogx@lemmy.world 1 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago)

Is that more than the kernel? How much more?

[-] steeznson@lemmy.world 0 points 10 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.

[-] PanArab@lemmy.ml 0 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 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).

this post was submitted on 16 Nov 2025
21 points (78.4% liked)

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