At the palindrom date 11/11/11, WebKit project hit its monumental 100,000-th check in. Now, what happened from the moment it was born till this time? The following chart shows the source code revision (vertical) as the function of time (horizontal). Some icons are there to represent few products associated with WebKit, the position approximately resembles the era those products were made popular.
When I became a WebKit reviewer, back then there were only around 40 other fellow reviewers. These days, the team consists of more than 100 reviewers plus many more contributors. To have some more insight about the heavy activities, I use the mirror git repository and count the number of commits from certain email domains.
Note: commit quantity is a bad code metric (there are commits due to revert, test rebaseline, unrelated fix, etc), the amount of commits only reflects the activities and should not be extrapolated to something else.
Using the wonderful --before and --after options of git log, I can get the log messages for every commit in the last 1.5 years (18 months). After that, I use a simple script to extract the author of each commit, taking into account a patch which is committed by a different person or by the commit bot. The outcome is not scientifically correct but it may have only few false positives. Once the result is dumped (JSON formatted), a little bit magic like this:
grep author | grep -Eo '(@[a-zA-Z0-9.-]+)' | sort -n | uniq -c | sort -nr
gives me the following list (cut arbitrarily to have only 24 entries):
11712 @chromium.org 9703 @apple.com 7727 @webkit.org 2541 @google.com 1760 @igalia.com 1134 @nokia.com 1081 @gmail.com 631 @rim.com 378 @samsung.com 348 @openbossa.org 271 @profusion.mobi 129 @company100.net 110 @motorola.com 100 @sencha.com 94 @paroga.com 91 @inf.u-szeged.hu 88 @collabora.co.uk 74 @adobe.com 46 @intel.com 42 @codeaurora.org 40 @torchmobile.com.cn 34 @gnome.org 18 @stud.u-szeged.hu 18 @forwardbias.in
Those who have access to the repository (the reviewers and committers) often use @webkit.org address instead of their affiliated organization. Some also prefer to use personal address (@gmail). Consider the importance of WebKit on mobile, do not be shocked to see more hardware-oriented companies (Motorola, Samsung, Intel, etc) are getting active. And do you spot Sencha there? 🙂
Now if we go back in time (good old days) and extract similar information, starting from the moment I got the reviewership early 2009, going back in time for the same span of 1.5 years, then the result looks completely different:
8062 @apple.com 3537 @webkit.org 519 @chromium.org 256 @trolltech.com 216 @gmail.com 182 @atoker.com 137 @uwaterloo.ca 137 @nuanti.com 119 @gnome.org 113 @nokia.com 79 @collabora.co.uk 77 @google.com 60 @selfish.org 53 @torchmobile.com 43 @igalia.com 35 @wayofthemonkey.com 31 @gmx.de 28 @mattlilek.com 24 @unpluggable.com 24 @twotoasts.de 21 @inf.u-szeged.hu 17 @kde.org 16 @mac.com 16 @belshe.com
Google Chrome was in its fancy days and thus we did not see much yet from the Googlers. Trolltech, the steward of Qt WebKit port, was being integrated to the rest of Nokia. Torch Mobile was still about to be bought by RIM. GNOME and its related consulting companies were also clearly visible.
Congratulations WebKit, and here’s to hundreds of thousands more!