On Medium.com Taylor Otwell, lead developer and creator of the Laravel framework, has posted some results about framework code complexity based on his own research and information gathering.

Last week as I was refactoring and cleaning Laravel for the 5.4 release, Graham Campbell showed me some code complexity statistics for the framework. I decided to compare this against some other PHP frameworks to see how Laravel stacks up.

[...] I was pleased to see Laravel has the lowest average method complexity of any of the frameworks measured. In addition, Laravel does not contain any method longer than 13 lines of code. [...] The primary goal of this comparison is to compare how I personally write code vs. how other projects are writing code. All project’s measured have a large enough sample size of pure, first-party code to accurately measure that.

He then shares the cyclomatic complexity numbers for several different (and popular) frameworks in the PHP ecosystem:

• Laravel
• Symfony
• Zend Framework
• Cake
• Slim

He also compares just the Eloquent ORM and the Doctrine ORM components. For each he provides stats like: lines of code, average method complexity and percentage of methods that are non-static. The results are interesting but most are pretty much expected (like the Slim microframework being lowest on several of the statistics mostly due to its size).