What is the largest program ever written?

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+2 Q:

What is the largest program ever written?

In a fit of idle curiosity, I was wondering that the largest program ever written was. What did it do? What language was it written in? How successful was it? How buggy was it? How many man years did it take to create?

I realise that 'largest' and 'program' are both a bit ill-defined. For the sake of argument I am defining it as a single process containing the largest number of executable statements.

+2 A:

I heard is is called "Xanadu"

srini.venigalla 2009-12-15 00:17:10

+1 A:

Visual Studio Team System 2008 was I think about 55 million lines of code, and is possibly the largest piece of commercial software ever, by that metric (I think it's a little bigger than Windows Vista was, anyway). It's mostly C++, with a smattering of C# and some other languages, I think. I think it represents many thousands of man-years of effort.

Brian 2009-12-15 00:25:46

Interesting. Is the VS2010 version smaller/only-in-beta-so-doesn't-count-yet/other?

Steve Jessop 2009-12-15 00:28:52

I don't know if 2010 will be bigger or smaller. I'm just mentioning 2008 because I recall seeing some poster on some wall after it shipped that had a bunch of stats including LoC, and at some point I heard someone say it was bigger than Windows (but only by a little).

Brian 2009-12-15 00:31:49

+6 A:

Here are some of the major contenders based on Lines of code. It isn't the best metric, but should give you a relative idea of the size of these projects.

    Project                     SLOC
    ------------------          -----
    Lucent 5ESS Switch          100m   
    Windows Vista              50m  
    Red Hat Linux 7.1          30m 
    Windows XP                40m    
    Visual Studio              40m  
    MS Office                  30m

Source: "World's Largest Software Project"

JohnFx 2009-12-15 00:29:22

Also notable that Fedora 9 is estimated on the same page at >200m LoC, by the cunning mechanism of throwing every potentially-useful line of code it can find into one enormous barrel, and calling that the product. It might be interesting to attempt a definition of "program" which doesn't include any of these projects. For example, a definition corresponding more closely to that in the C and C++ standards. Then again, it might turn into an exercise in "pick your winner, then set the rules".

Steve Jessop 2009-12-15 00:40:28

I don't think operating systems count as programs, but the numbers are interesting nonetheless.

Andy Brice 2009-12-17 11:16:36

What the hell is that switch doing that it needs double the loc of Vista.

mP 2010-05-17 03:11:52

+2 A:

Early Windows Hello World app?

Tor Valamo 2009-12-15 00:29:42

+4 A:

The entire universe is believed by some people and at least one famous person to be a program running on some rather specialized hardware.

bmargulies 2009-12-15 00:32:28

define "some" and provide a link, and you, sir, have my vote.

echo 2009-12-15 01:17:18

Mostly written in Perl, of course: http://www.xkcd.com/224/

Peter 2009-12-15 02:13:14

@Peter:Obviously the author of xkcd is a youngster. Everybody who's been around long knows that the universe came into being from a contest over who could do the most with a single line of APL.

Jerry Coffin 2009-12-15 03:17:50

The program is rather small, it just uses a huge amount of data. ;-)

starblue 2009-12-16 11:03:51

I was sure that "at least one famous person" was going to be Douglas Adams. You do realize the entire Earth is part of a computer program run by a hyper-race of mice, right?

JohnFx 2010-05-17 14:23:07

+1 A:

In 1978 the largest program allegedly contained 1 million lines (aka 1 million punchcards).

starblue 2009-12-16 11:16:08

ansaurus

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What is the largest program ever written?

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