Thread

Re: 10% drop in code line count in PG 17

Bruce Momjian <bruce@momjian.us> — 2025-11-19T20:34:55Z

On Wed, Nov 19, 2025 at 03:21:33PM -0500, Tom Lane wrote:
> Bruce Momjian <bruce@momjian.us> writes:
> > While working on a talk, I studied the number of code line changes in
> > each major release, and found PG 17 surprisingly reduced code line count
> > by 10%. To get the code line count, I used /pgtop/src/tools/codelines,
> > which runs:
> 
> > 	find . -name '*.[chyl]' | xargs cat| wc -l
> 
> > Any ideas on the cause of this decrease?
> 
> My first thought was that it had to do with the conversion of
> src/backend/nodes/ to be largely auto-generated code.  If you
> are using codelines against just what is in git, that would look
> like a decrease.  However, I see that came in during v16 not v17,
> so that's not the explanation.  I'm betting it's some similar
> effect though: code getting moved out of the set of files that
> will match '*.[chyl]'.

Huh.

> Also ... are you in fact counting only what is in git?  Because
> I get different answers:
> 
> $ git clean -dfxq
> $ git checkout REL_17_0
> HEAD is now at d7ec59a63d7 Stamp 17.0.
> $ src/tools/codelines
>  1664472
> $ git checkout REL_16_0
> HEAD is now at c372fbbd8e9 Doc: fix release date in release-16.sgml.
> $ src/tools/codelines
>  1595197

No, I just followed the shell comment I wrote above the 'find' command
shown above:

	# This script is used to compute the total number of "C" lines in the
	# release This should be run from the top of the Git tree after a 'make
	# distclean'

And that tree has been built many times.  Should I change my procedure?

-- 
  Bruce Momjian  <bruce@momjian.us>        https://momjian.us
  EDB                                      https://enterprisedb.com

  Do not let urgent matters crowd out time for investment in the future.