28 Oct
2017
28 Oct
'17
5:04 a.m.
On Fri, Oct 27, 2017 at 11:51:12PM +0200, Andy Kosela wrote:
It seems that it is very hard to avoid bloat in the
software world in the
long run. Most people don't care, but the original UNIX and C, Plan 9 and
Go projects could be one of the few I can think of that really cared about
minimalism.
We cared. We being the BitKeeper guys.
BK as of 2002 (bk-2.0.5):
33 documented commands
wc *.c
67633 225563 1565556 total
BK as of 15 years later (bk-7.3.2)
165 documented commands
wc *.c
125812 444197 3017977 total
So we doubled in size for all the built in commands but we had 5x as many
commands. A huge amount of functionality over the bk-2.x era.
The only way we did that was by encouraging and rewarding commits that took
out as much as they put in.
It's possible but you have to be disciplined.
--lm