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How Many Millions of Lines of Code Does It Take?

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7 years ago

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How Many Millions of Lines of Code Does It Take?

How Many Millions of Lines of Code Does It Take?

Today’s data visualization comes from David McCandless from Information is Beautiful. Buy their awesome book called Knowledge is Beautiful – we own the physical version, and it’s full of great data visualizations.

How many millions of lines of code does it take to make the modern program, web service, car, or airplane possible?

The range is extraordinary: the average iPhone app has less than 50,000 lines of code, while Google’s entire code base is two billion lines for all services. And interestingly, the code behind machines such as fighter jets, popular video game engines, and even the Large Hadron Collider fall somewhere in between these two extremes.

Increasing Complexity

A million lines of code, if printed, would be about 18,000 pages of text. That’s 14x the length of War and Peace.

It’s more than what was needed to run old technologies like the Space Shuttle, a pacemaker, or even the game engine of Quake 3 – but it’s not enough to be the driving force behind the modern software that’s used in everyday life today.

  • The control software to run a U.S. military drone uses 3.5 million lines of code.
  • A Boeing 787 has 6.5 million lines behind its avionics and online support systems.
  • Google Chrome (browser) runs on 6.7 million lines of code (upper estimate).
  • A Chevy Volt uses 10 million lines.
  • The Android operating system runs on 12-15 million lines.
  • The Large Hadron Collider uses 50 million lines.
  • Not including backend code, Facebook runs on 62 million lines of code.
  • With the advent of sophisticated, cloud-connected infotainment systems, the car software in a modern vehicle apparently uses 100 million lines of code. This is according to Wired magazine.
  • All Google services combine for a whopping 2 billion lines.

Applying the math above – that means it would take 36,000,000 pages to “print out” all of the code behind all Google services. That would be a stack of paper 2.2 mi (3.6 km) high!

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Markets

Charted: What are Retail Investors Interested in Buying in 2023?

What key themes and strategies are retail investors looking at for the rest of 2023? Preview: AI is a popular choice.

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1 day ago

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September 25, 2023

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A cropped bar chart showing the various options retail investors picked as part of their strategy for the second half of 2023.

Charted: Retail Investors’ Top Picks for 2023

U.S. retail investors, enticed by a brief pause in the interest rate cycle, came roaring back in the early summer. But what are their investment priorities for the second half of 2023?

We visualized the data from Public’s 2023 Retail Investor Report, which surveyed 1,005 retail investors on their platform, asking “which investment strategy or themes are you interested in as part of your overall investment strategy?”

Survey respondents ticked all the options that applied to them, thus their response percentages do not sum to 100%.

Where Are Retail Investors Putting Their Money?

By far the most popular strategy for retail investors is dividend investing with 50% of the respondents selecting it as something they’re interested in.

Dividends can help supplement incomes and come with tax benefits (especially for lower income investors or if the dividend is paid out into a tax-deferred account), and can be a popular choice during more inflationary times.

Investment StrategyPercent of Respondents
Dividend Investing50%
Artificial Intelligence36%
Total Stock Market Index36%
Renewable Energy33%
Big Tech31%
Treasuries (T-Bills)31%
Electric Vehicles 27%
Large Cap26%
Small Cap24%
Emerging Markets23%
Real Estate23%
Gold & Precious Metals23%
Mid Cap19%
Inflation Protection13%
Commodities12%

Meanwhile, the hype around AI hasn’t faded, with 36% of the respondents saying they’d be interested in investing in the theme—including juggernaut chipmaker Nvidia. This is tied for second place with Total Stock Market Index investing.

Treasury Bills (30%) represent the safety anchoring of the portfolio but the ongoing climate crisis is also on investors’ minds with Renewable Energy (33%) and EVs (27%) scoring fairly high on the interest list.

Commodities and Inflation-Protection stocks on the other hand have fallen out of favor.

Come on Barbie, Let’s Go Party…

Another interesting takeaway pulled from the survey is how conversations about prevailing companies—or the buzz around them—are influencing trades. The platform found that public investors in Mattel increased 6.6 times after the success of the ‘Barbie’ movie.

Bud Light also saw a 1.5x increase in retail investors, despite receiving negative attention from their fans after the company did a beer promotion campaign with trans influencer Dylan Mulvaney.

Given the origin story of a large chunk of American retail investors revolves around GameStop and AMC, these insights aren’t new, but they do reveal a persisting trend.

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