The worst I've personally seen was a many tens of millions of lines C++ Qt GUI app. Won't mention the name to protect the guilty but it's something some people here might recognize.
It didn't really need to be that big. A lot of its size was a result of pathological over-engineering. Apparently a previous (of course) engineer who built much of the original app thought boost::bind and functional binding was awesome. He also absolutely loved template meta-programming.
The code base was full of templates that contained templates that contained templates that contained... layers upon layers upon layers of templates, generics, bind, and so on. The horror. The compile times were awesome too. Local builds on an 8-core machine took 15-20 minutes.
I once made a commit to that code base where I replaced two entire subdirectories of files and tens of thousands of lines of code with one function. It took me weeks to understand and then finally to realize that none of it was necessary at all. It was all over-engineering. The function contained a case statement that did the job of layers of boost::bind and other cruft.
I definitely had a net negative line count at that job. The experience helped to solidify my loathing of unnecessary complexity.
It also made me respect languages like Go that purposely do not give the programmer tools like complex templating systems, dynamic language syntax, etc. It's not that these features have no uses, but honestly their uses are few. I've used Go for a while now and have found maybe two instances in tens of thousands of lines where I missed generics. I imagine I'd miss operator overloading in heavy math code, but that's about it. The problem is that these features are dangerous in the hands of "insufficiently lazy" programmers that love to over-engineer. I'd rather not have them and have to kludge just a little than to deal with code bases like the one I described above ever again.
It didn't really need to be that big. A lot of its size was a result of pathological over-engineering. Apparently a previous (of course) engineer who built much of the original app thought boost::bind and functional binding was awesome. He also absolutely loved template meta-programming.
The code base was full of templates that contained templates that contained templates that contained... layers upon layers upon layers of templates, generics, bind, and so on. The horror. The compile times were awesome too. Local builds on an 8-core machine took 15-20 minutes.
I once made a commit to that code base where I replaced two entire subdirectories of files and tens of thousands of lines of code with one function. It took me weeks to understand and then finally to realize that none of it was necessary at all. It was all over-engineering. The function contained a case statement that did the job of layers of boost::bind and other cruft.
I definitely had a net negative line count at that job. The experience helped to solidify my loathing of unnecessary complexity.
It also made me respect languages like Go that purposely do not give the programmer tools like complex templating systems, dynamic language syntax, etc. It's not that these features have no uses, but honestly their uses are few. I've used Go for a while now and have found maybe two instances in tens of thousands of lines where I missed generics. I imagine I'd miss operator overloading in heavy math code, but that's about it. The problem is that these features are dangerous in the hands of "insufficiently lazy" programmers that love to over-engineer. I'd rather not have them and have to kludge just a little than to deal with code bases like the one I described above ever again.