GCC Compiler Is Up To 7.3 Million Lines Of Code

Here's some staggering statistics about the development of GCC, the GNU Compiler Collection.

After providing Git stats on a number of graphics drivers, which proved to be interesting, here's some development stats for the Free Software Foundation's GCC. GitStats was run on the Git mirror of GCC as of 13 August to generate some rather intriguing numbers.

The Git activity goes back to 23 November 1988 and during the course of these past 8,665 days on 7,270 of those days there were code commits made to this leading open-source compiler. In total, GCC in Git is currently up to 77,053 files amounting to 7,348,239 lines of code as of yesterday.

The 7.3 million lines of code has been spread across 118,375 commits (an average of 16 commits per active day) and in the process there's been 24,456,429 lines of code added and 17,108,190 lines removed. A total of 470 developers have committed to the GCC repository.

GCC's development has really picked up in about the last 15 years.

So far this year there's been 4,046 commits to the GCC repository while in 2011 there were a total of 8,546 commits. The most commits ever in a single year to GCC were in 2004 when there were 9,595 commits. The activity so far this year saw the addition of 1,123,593 lines of new code and the removal of 812,895 lines of code.

The number one code contributor to GCC is Red Hat's Jeff Law. In second is Richard Kenner who was a contributor since 1991, but he hasn't committed to GCC since 2005. While RMS is in 8th place for the overall number of commits, he hasn't committed to GCC since 1997.

Joseph Myers has been adding a massive amount of code to GCC lately by line count.

A look at the top developers by commit count over time.

Some monthly GCC stats...

GCC's file count has been steadily rising for about the past five years.

The lines of code count for the GNU Compiler Collection is also continuing to rise with no signs of it slowing down.

Next up will be some development stats on LLVM/Clang.