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.
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.
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.
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.
