I'm not sure of the actual lines of code, but you can download the source code as it is now open source, since 2009.
Apollo 11 code goes ‘open source’ - APC
It's in assembly code basically (as we would call it now) so no surprise that it is verbose. A single line of even low level C code often corresponds to many lines of Assembly. The binary you get when you compile is no larger, it is just because you are programming it at a lower level, so less work for the compiler to do.
And - it's easy to rack up hundreds of thousands of lines of code as a single programmer working full time. For instance, if you write a hundred lines of code a day, that's a hundred thousand LOC every three years.
Depends - but low level programmers tend to write more lines of code a day, because the code is so much more verbose, so I'd expect they would write at least 100 a day in assembly, probably more, maybe several hundred??
At 100 lines of code a day, a million LOC is the result of a team of about ten programmers for three years. Very rough estimate. And an individual programmer writing at a low level could easily do more than a million lines of code in their lifetime.
Much of that programming is routine stuff.
A high level programmer, say C++ will write far fewer lines of code a day, and typically spends more time on each line of code because it encapsulates so much more functionality, don't have so much by way of "boilerplate" type code that you can just type out probably as fast as you can type.
Which doesn't mean that the program was complicated by modern standards. Just that back then you needed to write a lot more code to achieve the same things because high level languages were not yet fully developed or so widely used. Maybe it would correspond to a modern program of a few tens of thousands of lines of code?? Or whatever, just pulling a number out of a hat there.
Apollo 11 code goes ‘open source’ - APC
It's in assembly code basically (as we would call it now) so no surprise that it is verbose. A single line of even low level C code often corresponds to many lines of Assembly. The binary you get when you compile is no larger, it is just because you are programming it at a lower level, so less work for the compiler to do.
And - it's easy to rack up hundreds of thousands of lines of code as a single programmer working full time. For instance, if you write a hundred lines of code a day, that's a hundred thousand LOC every three years.
Depends - but low level programmers tend to write more lines of code a day, because the code is so much more verbose, so I'd expect they would write at least 100 a day in assembly, probably more, maybe several hundred??
At 100 lines of code a day, a million LOC is the result of a team of about ten programmers for three years. Very rough estimate. And an individual programmer writing at a low level could easily do more than a million lines of code in their lifetime.
Much of that programming is routine stuff.
A high level programmer, say C++ will write far fewer lines of code a day, and typically spends more time on each line of code because it encapsulates so much more functionality, don't have so much by way of "boilerplate" type code that you can just type out probably as fast as you can type.
Which doesn't mean that the program was complicated by modern standards. Just that back then you needed to write a lot more code to achieve the same things because high level languages were not yet fully developed or so widely used. Maybe it would correspond to a modern program of a few tens of thousands of lines of code?? Or whatever, just pulling a number out of a hat there.
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Robert Walker
Writer of articles on Mars and Space issues - Software Developer of Tune Smithy, Bounce Metronome etc.Studied at Wolfson College, Oxford
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