Your software design choices matter.
In 2006 I released a version of my dependency injection container called Butterfly DI Container - which was feature-wise about on par with the Spring Container and Google Guice. However, the size of the code bases were quite different:
- Spring Container: 1,000 KB JAR file
- Google Guice: 500 KB JAR file
- Butterfly DI Container: 100 KB JAR file
That is a factor 5 and 10 more code in Guice and Spring than in Butterfly DI - to provide essentially the same functionality.
I did not analyze why that difference was so big.
I just noted internally, that there are many ways to solve the same problem - to implement the same functionality - and the difference in code base size can be quite big.
Is that perhaps one of the secrets of the " N x developers " - that they are able to solve the same problems with less code than others?
July 18, 2025 706 1
