Django vs Rails Code Size

An entry from 2008-05-10 in the Journal.

I've been a long user of Ruby and frameworks like Rails, Merb, and Sinatra. I've been sort of following Django since it's first public release but never got aground to building something with it. My Python skills is a bit rusty compared to my Ruby skills so I've decided to start a project with Django.

Django seems like a fairly large project including a built-in admin-interface, internationalization and localization features in addition to other standard functionality as in Rails (templating, dispatcher, ORM, request processor). At first hand it seemed like Django would be a bit bloated compared to Rails considering the additional features it provided. The results when using cloc is contradicting my initial assumptions.

First we have the as-of-writing latest version of Rails:

[diamond:~/dev/rails]% git log | head -n 7
commit a7ea06b4ebe252e258f83e7de945b4baa30ec3bc
Author: Jacek Becela <jacek.becela@gmail.com>
Date:   Thu May 8 13:47:24 2008 +0200

    Make render shorthands work with namespaced controllers

    Signed-off-by: Pratik Naik <pratiknaik@gmail.com>

[diamond:~/dev/rails]% cloc --exclude-dir=.git .
    1383 text files.
    1354 unique files.                                          
     309 files ignored.

http://cloc.sourceforge.net v 1.03  T=8.0 s (143.8 files/s, 20227.0 lines/s)
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Language          files     blank   comment      code    scale   3rd gen. equiv
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Ruby               1040     18758     24739    102037 x   4.20 =      428555.40
Javascript           17      1930       870     11770 x   1.48 =       17419.60
YAML                 81       129        93      1017 x   0.90 =         915.30
HTML                  6        41         3       322 x   1.90 =         611.80
CSS                   4         9         3        45 x   1.00 =          45.00
SQL                   1         6         0        43 x   2.29 =          98.47
Bourne Shell          1         0         0         1 x   3.81 =           3.81
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
SUM:               1150     20873     25708    115235 x   3.88 =      447649.38
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Then the latest version of Django (from the Mercurial mirror):

[diamond:~/dev/django-trunk]% hg tip
changeset:   5420:3762db44f8cd
tag:         tip
user:        russellm
date:        Sat May 10 13:19:19 2008 +0000
summary:     Removed mark_safe from the saved request path on the admin login
              form. This prevents a potential XSS attack. Formal announcement
              will be forthcoming.

[diamond:~/dev/django-trunk]% cloc --exclude-dir=.hg .
      813 text files.          
      808 unique files.                                          
     2119 files ignored.

http://cloc.sourceforge.net v 1.03  T=3.0 s (208.3 files/s, 26209.3 lines/s)
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Language          files     blank   comment      code    scale   3rd gen. equiv
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Python              522     10295      4947     59394 x   4.20 =      249454.80
Javascript           13       106       258      1447 x   1.48 =        2141.56
HTML                 72       274         6      1283 x   1.90 =        2437.70
CSS                  11        60        59       354 x   1.00 =         354.00
make                  1        11         4        53 x   2.50 =         132.50
XML                   4         0         0        41 x   1.90 =          77.90
Bourne Shell          1         4         7        17 x   3.81 =          64.77
SQL                   1         1         0         7 x   2.29 =          16.03
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
SUM:                625     10751      5281     62596 x   4.07 =      254679.26
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Counting only code lines Django is 54% the size of Rails. Due note that this is highly unscientific. Rails provides features that Django don't (ActiveResource for instance).

Eivind Uggedal