BRbretpiatt·Oct 14, 2026
In Gemini 4 Argonboyter
scc
Go2018–2026
boyter / scc
scc
Sloc, Cloc and Code: scc is a very fast accurate code counter with complexity calculations and COCOMO estimates written in pure Go
13Distinct people
18Mentions
0Explicit recommenders
8.9KGitHub stars
What to know before exploring
What it is
Sloc, Cloc and Code: scc is a very fast accurate code counter with complexity calculations and COCOMO estimates written in pure Go
GitHub
Where it is used
No documented product use was verified in the last source check.
What people are saying
No recommendation phrase was found in the indexed comments.
No classified warning is attached to this page. Read the discussions before treating silence as approval.
Also in these discussions
- boyter/cs · linked in 2 of the same discussions
Mentioned in the same Hacker News threads. That is not proof they are substitutes.
This week on Hacker News
Nov 7–Nov 14 UTC · Direct repository links and separately labeled related project stories. Indexed through 11/14/2026, 3:03:16 PM UTC.
No direct repository links were found in the indexed HN discussions over the past seven days. Older discussions are available below.
Mentions over time
HN mentions by year18 dated mentions
Observed mentions: 2018-04-17 23:28:11 UTC to 2026-10-14 01:14:28 UTC.
* An incomplete calendar period is marked with an outlined bar. Its count is not directly comparable with a full period.
Counts come from the repository’s dated source evidence. Index cutoff: 2026-11-02 08:16:59 UTC.
View mention counts and date ranges
| Period | Start (UTC) | End (exclusive, UTC) | Mentions | Submissions | Comments |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2018 | 2018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 1 | 1 | 0 |
| 2019 | 2019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2 | 0 | 2 |
| 2020 | 2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| 2021 | 2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2 | 0 | 2 |
| 2022 | 2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 6 | 1 | 5 |
| 2023 | 2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 1 | 0 | 1 |
| 2024 | 2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2 | 1 | 1 |
| 2025 | 2025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2026-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 1 | 0 | 1 |
| 2026 (partial) | 2026-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2027-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 3 | 1 | 2 |
What Hacker News says
18 sourcesBeen working on https://searchcode.com/ again which I bought back, albeit as code search tool for LLMs. It solves the “should I use this library” by allowing the LLM to inspect search and analyse it before integration. Can use it to compare multiple repositories before downloading. It comes with a large amount of token savings and can be really useful when wanting to learn about a codebase.
Since it does it anyway I added dossier pages to it as well https://searchcode.com/repo/github.com/rust-lang/rust Which is useful for humans, and shows what the system is creating.
Best part is that I get to use the tools I have built, so https://github.com/boyter/scc and https://github.com/boyter/cs to improve it which benefits anyone using those tools.
In Ask HN: What are you working on? (May 2026)Show HN: CS – indexless code search that understands code, comments and strings
I initially built cs (codespelunker) as a way to answer the question, can BM25 relevance search work without building an index?
Turns out it can, and so I iterated on the idea, building it into a full CLI tool. Recently I wanted to improve it by adding relevance of tools like Sourcegraph or Zoekt but again without adding an index.
cs uses scc https://github.com/boyter/scc to understand the structure of the file on the fly. As such it can filter searches to code, comments or strings. It also applies a weighted BM25 algorithm where matches in actual code rank higher than matches in comments (by default).
I also added a complexity gravity weight using the cyclomatic complexity output from scc as it scans. So if you're searching for a function, the implementation should rank higher than the interface.
cs "authenticate" --gravity=brain
Read the rest
# Find the complex implementation, not the interface
cs "FIXME OR TODO OR HACK" --only-comments # Search only in comments, not code or strings
cs "error" --only-strings # Find where error messages are defined
cs "handleRequest" --only-usages # Find every call site, skip the definition
v3.0.0 adds a new ranker, along with a interactive TUI, HTTP mode, and MCP support for use with LLMs (Claude Code/Cursor).
Since it's doing analysis and complexity math on the fly, it's slower than any grep. However, on an M1 Mac, it can scan and rank the entire 40M+ line Linux kernel in ~6 seconds.
Live demo (running over its own source code in HTTP mode): https://codespelunker.boyter.org/
GitHub: https://github.com/boyter/cs
Related: https://github.com/boyter/scc , which can also separately count code that is generated (based on keywords in the files).
This is useful in cases where API layers (think protobuf -> target lang) are generated by a complier, and you want to know how much code is manually created.
In Tokei: Count Your Code, QuicklyMore lines of code usually indicates more bugs so its not an entirely useless metric. Using it to gauge employee productivity is, since as the linked suggests some of the better programmers are able to remove code, which often reduces the potential for bugs.
I personally find some use it in, if nothing else to identify which files probably need to be refactored as they are too large, or complex. Throw in some cyclomatic complexity and you are getting some useful information out the code counts.
Counting lines of code is one metric though. Another I have seen thrown around is ULOC https://cmcenroe.me/2018/12/14/uloc.html where you count the number of unique lines of code,
sort -u *.h *.c | wc -l
Again another metric that potentially speaks to the health of a project. I personally wrote about this some time ago when someone asked why I
Read the rest
wrote a code counting project https://boyter.org/posts/why-count-lines-of-code/ and I liked the idea of ULOC so much I integrated it into the project as well.
Clearly I am not alone in this though, hence there being so many code counters around (forgive me if I missed yours in the following list) and discussion around it.
- [SLOCCount](https://www.dwheeler.com/sloccount/) the original sloc counter
- [cloc](https://github.com/AlDanial/cloc), inspired by SLOCCount; implemented in Perl for portability
- [gocloc](https://github.com/hhatto/gocloc) a sloc counter in Go inspired by tokei
- [loc](https://github.com/cgag/loc) rust implementation similar to tokei but often faster
- [loccount](https://gitlab.com/esr/loccount) Go implementation written and maintained by ESR
- [ployglot](https://github.com/vmchale/polyglot) ATS sloc counter
- [tokei](https://github.com/XAMPPRocky/tokei) fast, accurate and written in rust
- [sloc](https://github.com/flosse/sloc) coffeescript code counter
- [scc](https://github.com/boyter/scc) my own counter
Incidentally the articles author confused me for a while using standard unix tools to count code, as I had them confused for David Wheeler who wrote the very first code counter that I know of sloccount.
Scc: A fast code counter with complexity calculations and COCOMO estimates
1 points · Open discussionIt's weird, I've heard of the author plenty of times (and frequently use https://github.com/boyter/scc), I would've thought they knew about using an empty interface to emulate a set with no overhead in Go.
In Deduplicate a slice in Go, use sort or a map?Going to say my own https://github.com/boyter/scc/ which I have used to turn down projects of "Oh we just need to do X"
It allows me to evaluate the code-base quickly and see where potential issues are, and find hidden complexity in the code. I have said no a lot due to it. The only reason it exists was because I got caught out from another project, which wasted months of my time.
Otherwise IntelliJ and the JetBrains IDE's in general.
In Ask HN: Programs that saved you 100 hours? (2022 edition)Very cool to see this here, Ben! It was fun hearing the ins and outs of your work on this in the TZ discord, and the final result is fast.
Also, off-topic but as you know, I recently tried out your scc tool and am eagerly awaiting its support for Elixir templates (.eex, .heex)! You said it was a day from done a while back and would go out in the next release. What’s the release schedule like?
https://github.com/boyter/scc
In Building a custom code search index in GoI've seen some real world example where Go was as fast or faster than Rust for CPU / io intensive task.
Go is a fast language even with a GC.
https://github.com/boyter/scc/#performance
In Incremental Parsing in GoMost likely: https://github.com/boyter/scc
In Goal: Pass all 4259065 tests in sqllogictest in 1 weekA fast accurate code counter with complexity calculations and COCOMO estimates
13 points · Open discussionscc is an insanely fast alternative to cloc: https://github.com/boyter/scc
nnn is also my go to file tree navigation / file moving tool these days too: https://github.com/jarun/nnn
In A simple, fast and user-friendly alternative to ‘find’You might want to look at https://github.com/boyter/scc
It's the same as cloc, but ludicrously fast.
In Show HN: Simplenetes – I replaced Kubernetes with 17k lines of shell scriptShowing the 15 most recent of 18 sources. Enable JavaScript to search and browse every indexed mention.