Qgis Then and Now
QGIS turns twenty this year. I wrote the first lines of code in mid-February of 2002.
As many of you may know, the first time the code compiled and ran, it could do one thing:
- Connect to a PostGIS database and draw a vector layer.
This was the humble beginning of one of the most popular open source GIS applications. GRASS GIS is of course the grandaddy of open source GIS, but the 20th birthday of QGIS is a testament to its longevity and commitment of all those who have made it what it is today.
I did an analysis of the code using cloc, which counts the lines of code and displays a summary.
The first listing is for the code base as it stood in 2002 when first checked into CVS [1] on SourceForge. From the table below you can see it consisted of 30 files and a total of 2,173 lines of “code”:
github.com/AlDanial/cloc v 1.86 T=0.02 s (1331.4 files/s, 121821.7 lines/s)
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Language files blank comment code
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
C++ 12 93 126 996
Qt 3 0 0 775
C/C++ Header 13 91 183 206
make 1 59 15 169
qmake 1 1 4 27
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
SUM: 30 244 328 2173
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
The second analysis is from a fresh checkout of the code base today. The difference is really astounding, even considering the time that has gone into development since the beginning:
github.com/AlDanial/cloc v 1.86 T=9.89 s (278.1 files/s, 269839.7 lines/s)
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Language files blank comment code
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Qt Linguist 45 3307 0 1731810
C 26 11680 53117 236881
C++ 684 44309 33493 233137
SVG 414 417 361 91748
Qt 220 2 0 60544
C/C++ Header 734 18064 40561 44466
Python 102 5384 4915 19916
XML 317 339 26 12109
CMake 122 1440 1284 5897
HTML 7 564 12 5138
Bourne Shell 33 303 355 1752
QML 17 0 0 1299
Perl 9 280 272 857
XMI 1 11 0 575
DOS Batch 7 135 24 474
make 1 37 19 138
SQL 2 17 32 129
CSS 2 3 0 102
DTD 1 11 42 81
m4 1 16 11 74
XSD 1 0 0 49
Windows Module Definition 1 2 0 40
Scheme 1 0 0 24
Bourne Again Shell 1 2 15 5
Windows Resource File 1 0 0 1
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
SUM: 2750 86323 134539 2447246
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
That’s over 2.4 million lines of code and 2,750 files. Never in my wildest dream would I have imagined the project would look like this 20 years later and there’s no sign that progress is slowing down.
Kudos to all those that have contributed over the years and those that continue to make QGIS a fantastic tool that anyone can afford. The impact of those efforts can never be quantitatively measured [2], but if it were, I’m sure we’d all be surprised.
[1] The QGIS code base used version control from the beginning and over the years transitioned from CVS to SVN (subversion), and finally git.
[2] QGIS doesn’t track users or keep any metrics on use apart from downloads from the website, which provides a small indication of the user base.
