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by groby_b 5257 days ago
Looking at OMeta, it seems to use libcairo and X11. It's hardly fair to _not_ count those lines. Same goes for dedicated languages. If I don't have to count my toolchain, and I'm allowed specialized languages, I can do everything in one line...

   DoAwesomeStuffJustLikeILikeIt();
Don't get me wrong, there's some cool stuff there - but the claims of 4 orders of magnitude seem exaggerated to me.
1 comments
loup-vaillant 5257 days ago
Wait, what? OMeta uses libcairo and X11?! Where did you see that? The only thing I saw it use is a host programming language (Javascript or Python or Ruby…). You may want to count those lines instead. Anyway, remember that they also claim a full language stack in less than 2000 lines. Including a variant of OMeta. Even Lua is 5 times as big. Not counting GCC.

I know it's unbelievable. But other personal experiences make me think they're probably right. I have written equivalent OCaml and C++ code where the C++ version were 5 times larger (both where optimized for clarity). In my day job, I routinely divide substantial portions of C++ code by 2 through light refactoring.

VPRI's miracle doesn't only come from the awesomeness of their ideas. It also comes from the awfulness of current systems. A full desktop in 20.000 lines may not be so small, if you consider that current ones are way too big.

Addendum: I omitted a rather important detail: while the STEPS project aims to build a full desktop system, along with networking, publishing, messaging, and programming capabilities, it makes no attempt be compatible with anything (except the hardware on which it has to run). It doesn't do HTTP nor HTML, for instance.

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groby_b 5257 days ago
Based on a cursory glance at the sources. Maybe I'm misreading things, or maybe it's an intermediate version - certainly possible.

And, to be clear, I _do_ believe there are substantial savings in program size to be had. (Especially over C++. Chatty little monster ;)

It's the 4 orders of magnitude that make me doubtful. The good thing, AFAIK VPRI is a year or so from completion, so we'll see soon. And even if it's not 4 orders of magnitude, I'm sure there's a lot to learn from it.

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