| title | CPython: 36 Years of Source Code | |
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| publishDate | 2026-03-08 | |
| author | Stan Ulbrych | |
| description | An analysis of the growth of CPython's codebase from its first commits to the present day | |
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| published | true |
While working on a patch and navigating through CPython, I got curious as to how the codebase has grown over the years. Using an interesting tool I found on the internet to count lines of code (cloc), some scripts, and some patience (thank goodness for multiple cores, or I’d be at this all day), I amassed a 1,392 commit dataset. With that, and some Git spelunking for the annotations, I was able to generate the above graph.
Many thanks to Tim, Ned, and Hugo for their help with this little project! I plan to tidy my scripts and upload them to a repository sometime in the near future. Please feel free to use my dataset :-)