[Frost1x]

While I tend to agree, I think LoC can give a sense of scale for large systems and at least a tiny bit of insight about its potential complexity.

I recently worked with a client on an integration effort that had to touch many different points on a (massive, for me) codebase with tens of millions of LoC. For that, LoC was the only reasonable metric I could come up with to try and convey the scale and complexity of the task at hand--being quite ignorant of the system's (and subsystems') architecture(s) at the time.

That was further complicated by the way the massive codebase supported all sorts of dynamic compositions and certain interactions needed to work with baseline compositions expressed in a form of markup totaling about about 5 times the amount of the actual code base, amongst other things.

These folks thought the integration could be done for $80k tops and in a couple months. It took LoC metrics to get them to understand the potential complexity at hand and that a lot more time needed to be spent in assessment and design before jumping in.

[nemosaltat]

Hopefully you’ll forgive this potentially obvious question- is LoC (still?) generally accepted to be bounded ar 80 col?

[0xEFF]

In some circles yes. Linus recently weighed in against the 80 limit.

http://lkml.iu.edu/hypermail/linux/kernel/2005.3/08168.html

[awirth]

I assume you probably can't share the client, but can you share the general domain of the software?

[Frost1x]

General domain is modeling and simulation

[awirth]

Thanks! That's interesting!