ONSdigital / Code

sdg-indicators is 2.9 GB of git - a 2013 static snapshot of www.gov.uk, not source code. It single-handedly makes HTML the largest language by volume (36% of all source bytes). Any size or language statistic that does not exclude it is measuring an archive, not a codebase.

This organisation was harvested with blobless partial clones, which fetch every commit and file path but not file contents, so there is no local size to measure against. Checked elsewhere in this dataset against 1,526 fully mirrored repositories, GitHub's reported size is accurate to within about six percent.

Ruby is the primary language of 2% of archived repositories but only 1% of live ones. Python, Go, TypeScript and HCL have taken the difference - the signature of a shift from monolithic Rails publishing apps toward data pipelines, infrastructure-as-code and platform tooling.

70% of repositories are under a megabyte of git data. The estate is not a monolith - it is a very long tail of small services, gems and prototypes around a few large publishing applications.