I can't say. I work here, but I don't speak for the company.

Wouldn't it be nice if by working there you felt empowered to speak for the company? The company is you and your colleagues.

I'd bet he has a lot of colleagues more qualified to question what he cares to reveal about their collective private intellectual property than you

Not sure I understand your point. The source the article refers to claims Windows XP is ~45 million LOC, not me. I myself didn't give any specific numbers about the size of the codebase.

Now, I don't think anyone would come for my head if I did give you a number -- what harm could it do, after all? But, personally, the line I draw is that I don't get too specific about internal data beyond a general order of magnitude, because I'm not here to speak for the company.

That figure is common knowledge, not new information that antics is sharing with us. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Source_lines_of_code#Example

And why is that number a corporate secret?

I doubt it is, and I don't think I'd get in trouble for sharing it.

But, it's not my job to decide whether or not that information should be shared, because it's not my job to speak for the company.

I'm having a hard time understanding why people think this is not a reasonable position.

Because in a room full of interested people you said "I know something you don't." and the "ner ner ne-ner ner" was implied.

> Seems like it gives you a hard-on [...] please stop acting like you're the shit

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I agree. The corporate policy is to not disclose that number, so all that the parent comment translates to is an appeal to authority. "You're wrong because I work for Microsoft and I know better!".

But we're not told what the correct number is, and we have no way of assessing the validity of the claim anyway, so the whole discussion is completely vacuous.

I would agree in the sense that LOC isn't an informative metric at all since there is surely a lot of auto-generated and copy & paste code in there, likely superlineraly more than a medium sized software project. It doesn't matter whether it's off by some orders of magnitude as it's beyond imagination and comparison anyway.

if combined with other data, it could show how inefficient/efficient programmers are

Well, you just said what it doesn't have, so I guess you speak for the company after all.

Anyway, let me guess. Judging by how the size of all binaries shipped with Windows varied between releases, I'd be inclined to think Windows 10 does not have significantly more lines of code than Windows Vista.

So I'd guess at most 100 million lines of code?

You are of course free to consult your employer and draw your line however you like.

For me, I'm comfortable saying that I don't speak for the company and leaving the numbers within an order of magnitude. When it becomes my job to decide which numbers are and aren't fit to talk about publicly, I'm happy to update you.

I wish you'd use standard numbers... like "Libraries of Congress".

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It's a pretty hard number to come up with. Most employees only have access to a small fraction of the codebase. Even if you had access to all of it, it's hard to say what actually counts as Windows and what doesn't.