from Hacker News

Ask HN: Tool to show code age across VCS history

by tiddles on 3/28/21, 9:36 AM with 1 comments

I'm sure there was a Show HN last year for a tool that generates a stacked line graph of the amount of code that has been churned over time. The X axis is time, and the Y is lines of code, and each layer in the stacked graph neatly shows how much original code remains in the code base, and how much has been rewritten. I think its repo shows example graphs for big projects including the Linux kernel.

I've searched for every relevant keyword I can think of but cannot find this tool again. Does anyone also remember it and have a link to it?

  • by sdesol on 3/29/21, 3:44 PM

    My solution (https://gitsense.com) captures every line change but it's currently not designed to tell you how munch of the original code base is still being used. If the solution could do this, I would have guess the numbers wouldn't be very accurate or comes with a big caveat since this would be extremely difficult to do.

    I guess you can track every blame, but that would be extremely computationally heavy and doable, if you are looking for something that can give you a timeline for something as big as the linux kernel.