So many thoughts on this. The community has definitely ebbed and flowed, on this for a while. A few varying pieces of insight with no intention other than to share a bit more on the PG community. And I'm sure some current and former colleagues already in comment threads are going to correct me on nuance of a lot of this.

For several years there were no new committers at all. In recent years the team has tried to be a little more intentional about adding new ones and culling those no longer involved.

About 15 years there was a phase of letting a lot of younger people earn their commit bit. I can recall 3 people by name that all got a commit bit before the age of 25, and they may have actually all been under 22. One of those three shortly after moved on to work outside of the Postgres community, another quietly was busy on other things for over 10 years before coming back, and the third was actively involved going forward. I suspect there was some unease of folks getting a commit bit and then sort of falling off a cliff so it slowed for a few years on adding new folks. Edit - sounds like it was less age driven but maybe still slightly related to some folks falling off that there was a slow down in new committers – tldr - you're not getting a commit bit right out of college for Postgres.

What to me would be interesting but likely hard to gather is what age to people become a committer to Postgres. It wouldn't surprise me if the average age of getting a commit bit is closer to 45 than not. Many folks contributing come to Postgres after other systems work or just don't consider contributing to they're a bit more seasoned because it feels intimidating–I mean patches sent on a mailing list who does that any more? Postgres thats who.

How much bigger (in lines of code) is Postgres now versus the one from 15 years ago?

Maybe it was more approachable for a 22yo then, you could figure out more of it.

Also, C was a standard language back then, today the kids are more likely to program in Rust than in C.

> How much bigger (in lines of code) is Postgres now versus the one from 15 years ago?

I was curious as well and wrote a, very crude, script to measure it:

  for t in $(git tag -l|grep -E 'REL.*_0$|REL[67]_[0-4]$'|grep -v REL2);do echo -ne "$t\t"; git ls-tree -r $t --object-only |xargs git show |grep -a -v '^\s+$'|wc -l;done
  REL6_1          270033
  REL6_2          320297
  REL6_3          386532
  REL7_0          630771
  REL7_1          843219
  REL7_2          986991
  REL7_3          1363668
  REL7_4          1492418
  REL8_0_0        1649775
  REL8_1_0        1702325
  REL8_2_0        1806170
  REL8_3_0        2017685
  REL8_4_0        1924918
  REL9_0_0        2011704
  REL9_1_0        2225796
  REL9_2_0        2290872
  REL9_3_0        2405598
  REL9_4_0        2487304
  REL9_5_0        2527906
  REL9_6_0        2632559
  REL_10_0        2534653
  REL_11_0        2771914
  REL_12_0        2697892
  REL_13_0        2822066
  REL_14_0        2980221
  REL_15_0        3054963
  REL_16_0        3351147

This is counting non-empty lines. It's definitely not a good measure of overall code size, as it includes things like regression tests "expected" files. But as that's true for all versions, it should still allow for a decent comparison.

8.3.0 was released 2008-02-01, with 2M non-empty lines, we're now at 3.4M.

I suspect you'd get much more useful results by checking out the version tags and running `cloc` - https://github.com/AlDanial/cloc