/crypto-projects-complexity-comparison

Primary LanguageJavaScript

Crypto projects complexity comparison

This project is a follow-up to this Ethereum development lead tweet

Tweet

which states that the complexity of Ethereum never decreased and that this might be a worrying trend.

This project tries to:

  • Quantify the complexity as lines of code of given project over time
  • Compare the biggest crypto projects and see if there are any trends

Result

Result

Year BTC ETH
LOC % change y/y LOC % change y/y
2010 28,460
2011 33,492 18%
2012 21,196 -37%
2013 39,631 87%
2014 47,685 20%
2015 66,327 39% 37,244
2016 75,917 14% 78,685 111%
2017 85,976 13% 115,449 47%
2018 94,448 10% 200,680 74%
2019 105,534 12% 237,222 18%
2020 111,615 6% 237,222 0%
2021 122,082 9% 391,998 65%
2022 138,063 13% 417,000 6%
AVG 17% 46%

Analysis method

  1. Gather repositories of crypto projects (some can have more than one).
  2. Find the date of the first and last commit in the given repository.
  3. Generate a range of dates with 1-month increments rounded to the start of the month (2020-01-01, 2020-02-01, 2020-03-01, ..).
    • This Range starts on the first day of the whole month after the first commit and ends on the first day of the month of the last commit (2010-05-10 — 2020-10-20 -> 2010-06-01 — 2020-10-01).
  4. For each item in this range we find commit at the same date or closest one before the date.
  5. For each of these commit we check out the repository and run cloc binary to determine lines of code in the project at that time.
    • We try to filter:
      • Test code.
      • Benchmark code.
      • Non-core source code files (Markdown, JSON, HTML, translations, ...).
      • Committed external dependencies in the project.

Notes to certain projects

  • Bitcoin
    • Filtered out UI code in src/qt.
  • Ethereum
    • go-ethereum seems to be using 2 submodules and we are not cloning/initializing these nested submodules (we do not do git submodule --recursive), so they are not included in the analysis. These submodules seem to only be testing-related, so it is probably correct that they are not included.
    • We include solidity in the analysis since it seems to be a core part of the project.
    • Ethereum used to commit external Go vender/dependencies into the project in the /Godeps and later in the /vendor folders, these are filtered out (with them, the LOC are about 2.5x bigger).

Run

Prerequisites

  • Node.js and NPM is required

Install

  • Init git submodules git submodule update --init
  • Install Node dependencies npm install

Start

  • Analyze repositories
    • Run git submodule update --remote --merge to update the submodules
    • Run npm run start
    • Generates result/res.json
  • Show chart
    • Run npm run chart
    • Point your browser to http://localhost:3000/chart
      • Click the chart settings button for csv or png export