In the rush to get numbers for Ian’s Europa stats report, I got wind of a web site that gathers these stats for us. The CDT’s numbers are here. There are a couple of items that caught my attention. First was that CDTs line of code count is only 646,651. I believe at one point we were actually more that 700,000 so we’ve really cleaned up a lot of dead features over the last year or so. It also shows the power of the Eclipse Platform that we can take it and offer a complete IDE for C/C++ in such little code.

The other number that caught my eye is the estimated 176 person years of effort to build all this. I’m not really sure how they got that number but looking at the breakdown by developer, it seems pretty reasonable. At a loaded labour rate of $150K US, that’s about a $26M investment, which points back to the main reason I think the CDT is successful commercially. Not many companies could afford to do that on their own.

Taking a look at the contributors list, also reminded me of all the people that have worked on the CDT over the years, 32 in total. And although some have moved on, their contributions were huge and still pay a important role in the CDT today (thanks, John and Alain!). And we have new blood to take over and they are quickly catching up, especially the gang from Intel and Wind River, and the new team at IBM and Symbian are starting to role, and of course, our debug keepers from ARM, Nokia and Freescale.

On the eve of our biggest release, CDT 4.0, it was nice to sit back for a moment and think of all the great contributions we’ve received and the great people we’ve worked with over the last 5 years that play such a big part in getting us where we’ll be tomorrow.