GCC Compiler Is Up To 7.3 Million Lines Of Code

I am far from an expert, so can someone explain if GCC is crazy big or not?

[Phoronix] GCC Compiler Is Up To 7.3 Million Lines Of Code

"crazy big" as "unnecessarily big", noway. It has enormous functionality and supports many languages. But it IS big, no doubt about it. I'm just concerned that with all this code accumulating it'll be difficult making changes and/or addons. Luckily, GCC has some strict coding rules!... ;)

If you've ever had the "fun" of building GCC and the other parts (binutils, libgcc) you'll notice 2 things pretty quickly -

• There's tons of code and it takes a long time to build
• A few "configure" commands can make a tool that cross compiles onto a completely different architecture

A very advanced tool, so you can understand the size of the code!