[vtkusers] How BIG is VTK ?

[Sebastien BARRE]

At 23/06/2001 09:49, Will Schroeder wrote:

>+ Kitware hosts vtk, but it's a community effort. A lot of folks from 
>around the world have contributed (including you Tim :-) and that effort 
>should not be minimized.

Definitely.

So do you think that if we could count in terms of "full-time developper on 
VTK", we'd be far from that number ? :
>Estimated Average Number of Developers  (Effort/Schedule)    = 32.68


>+ It constantly surprises me that people are amazed that "VTK is free." It 
>turns out that there are real benefits to this approach (so our customers 
>have told us) because they can build on a solid, uniform base, and then 
>build proprietary extensions if necessary. (In a sense this is what 
>Kitware does with it's products.) Then they don't have to worry about 
>maintaining all the code, just their extensions.

Has this something to do with "being free" ? I mean, they could buy license 
for commercial software, as well as the corresponding support and 
Development Toolkits. They wouldn't also have to worry about the code, but 
they would pay for that.

>Also, we get resumes from some amazing people who are already fluent in 
>vtk, so they can work for Kitware (or other companies) with little 
>training costs.

Really :) ?

>And don't forget the marketing exposure...the fact that applications have 
>greater market potential than toolkits...So, IMHO,  the "giving it away" 
>part actually has significant business benefits.

True.

Indeed some others Toolkit moved to OpenSource too. EADS Matra Datavision 
moved its CAD/CAM product in december 1999 (OpenCascade 
www.opencascade.com). IBM's Data Explorer was OpenSource'd in May 1999 
(http://www.opendx.org/), etc.
If someone knows a developper in either of these softwares, we could ask 
about their benefits since they moved to OpenSource.

>+ I'm amazed it's not more lines of code.

I remember of a 400 K SLOC somewhere in the old VTK site :) OK, the new VTK 
site shows 350 K SLOC now :)

Compare with the biggest package in Linux (using the same tool, sloccount) :

SLOC Directory SLOC-by-Language (Sorted)

2437470 kernel-2.4.2    ansic=2285657,asm=144411,sh=3035,perl=2022,yacc=1147,
                         tcl=576,lex=302,awk=248,sed=72

2065224 mozilla         cpp=1279902,ansic=739470,perl=21220,sh=13717,asm=5212,
                         java=3107,yacc=1831,lex=470,csh=271,sed=24

1837608 XFree86-4.0.3   ansic=1750460,asm=35397,cpp=20725,sh=14666,tcl=9182,
                         yacc=3360,perl=1675,lex=1608,awk=393,csh=85,sed=57

984076  gcc-2.96-20000731 
ansic=789901,cpp=126738,yacc=19272,sh=17993,asm=14559,
                         lisp=7161,fortran=3814,exp=3705,objc=479,sed=310,perl=144

967263  gdb+dejagnu-20010316 
ansic=871288,exp=58422,sh=12054,cpp=8252,yacc=5906,
                         asm=5031,tcl=4477,lisp=1403,sed=248,awk=170,java=7,fortran=5

690983  binutils-2.10.91.0.2 ansic=489993,asm=161236,exp=13234,sh=12835,
                         yacc=5665,cpp=4777,lex=1488,perl=776,sed=561,lisp=394,awk=24

646692  glibc-2.2.2     ansic=548722,asm=88413,sh=6036,perl=2120,awk=1037,
                         yacc=315,sed=49

627626  emacs-20.7      lisp=453898,ansic=169956,sh=2622,perl=884,asm=253,
                         csh=9,sed=4

474829  LAPACK          fortran=473590,ansic=1239

455980  gimp-1.2.1      ansic=427967,perl=17482,lisp=9648,yacc=502,sh=381

402799  mysql-3.23.36   ansic=249350,cpp=84068,perl=25088,tcl=18980,sh=18323,
                         asm=3987,awk=1436,java=1149,sed=418

395194  tcltk-8.3.1     ansic=291457,tcl=84322,sh=12259,exp=5742,yacc=876,
                         awk=273,perl=265

345949  kdebase-2.1.1   cpp=181210,ansic=158682,sh=4880,perl=1155,python=22

323730  Mesa-3.4        ansic=286437,cpp=18189,asm=10002,sh=7611,objc=1184,
                         python=307
                         [GPL/MIT]

OK, we are a bit smaller than Tcl/Tk :)) But bigger than KDE base. And 
Mesa. Wow, Mesa is big :) I guess we could count the SLOC for OpenDX or 
OpenCascade too.