Angular versus Backbone in lines of code

25 Sep 2015

Introduction

In this post we will do a quick comparison of how many lines of code you are actually importing into your project when adding a framework.

Running bower install angular or bower install backbone is just a few keystrokes away. Sometimes you do not realize how this effects the performance of your app. Seeing how big these frameworks are in terms of size/lines of code makes you ask yourself the question: do we really need it?

Number of lines

• Angular: > 20.000
• Backbone: 1.900

This is a comparison you might have seen. In my opinion this is not a fair assessment. Backbone requires you to also install Underscore and JQuery.

• JQuery: 9.000
• Underscore: 1.500

So this makes the whole Backbone framework weigh in at about:

• Backbone: 1.900 + 9.000 (JQuery) + 1.500 (Underscore) = 12.400 lines of code

In summary we get a more fair comparison with:

• Angular: > 20.000
• Backbone: 12.400

It is fair to say that Backbone is about half the size of Angular.

Most of the time you do not even need a full framework and you can just use JQuery. And even then you sometimes don’t even really need JQuery as this website proves: http://youmightnotneedjquery.com/!