Inside the 12‑Year Nightmare: How a 6‑Million‑Line C++ Project Became a Software Hell

1. The Hellish Project

The project began in 1996 for a French government agency, promising a two‑to‑three‑year delivery but spiraled into a twelve‑year disaster. Over 600 0000 lines of C++ code, more than 50 000 classes, and reliance on obsolete C++ syntax, CORBA, and a bankrupt‑company database made the codebase impossible to maintain.

Key technical woes included:

40‑50 threads required just to run the UI

Compilation on 32 parallel machines took 48 hours

Executable size reached several hundred megabytes

Startup time around 15 minutes, with crashes occurring within 30 seconds to 30 minutes

2. Code Quality

The C++ used was notoriously complex; even its creator, Bjarne Stroustrup, admitted it was hard to master. Young developers were drawn to its reputation but spent weeks debugging incomprehensible code, often burning out.

Typical bugs illustrated the absurdity:

A right‑click menu required 45 minutes to generate because it dynamically built every menu item from a massive static content library.

Loading 700 MB from a CD‑ROM took about seven days.

3. Version‑Control Chaos

For years the team worked without any version‑control system. When a tool was finally introduced, it was switched repeatedly, and eventually lost all history. The new system required appointments to check out files, approvals from middle managers for every change, and forced every commit through an automatic bug‑detection program that still produced more bugs than it fixed.

Consequences included:

File checkout could take a week after requesting permission.

Every modification triggered a new branch, forcing developers to manually merge changes, often in the same 100‑ish hot files.

Version numbers were meaningless, leading to customers receiving outdated builds.

4. Team Composition and Management

Management repeatedly cut experienced programmers and replaced them with inexperienced hires, resulting in a staff of 55 people where only 20 were developers and the rest were managers—roughly 1.75 managers per programmer.

Absurd policies included firing anyone arriving after 9 am, disabling the coffee machine to “increase productivity,” and maintaining filthy restrooms to discourage breaks.

5. Inevitable End

The vicious cycle of inexperience, inefficiency, and cost overruns continued until the company’s leadership was arrested for embezzlement, finally ending the project after more than a decade of suffering.

The author’s advice to newcomers: avoid C++ at all costs, steer clear of object‑oriented databases and CORBA, and be wary of overly grandiose product managers.