BOboyter·Jul 29, 2024
More 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.