this post was submitted on 31 Jan 2025
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I've tried a few tools like cloc to count the lines of code within my cpp project.

However, they are pretty surface level and just count the lines.

Is there anything that is able to show how many lines are for classe, imports, simple aliases, typedefs, and more detailed info like that.

My codebase is using C++ 20 modules and a lot of it is just imports and namespace aliases, so just counting the lines is pretty inaccurate. A lot of the files are simply just 10-20 lines at the header for imports, etc, and then just a small child class with constructors.

Which is to say that it's >50% "filler" in a lot of files.

If anyone knows any tools for this, ideally FOSS, please let me know. Thanks!

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[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 day ago (1 children)

tokei is the tool that came to mind reading your title.

Getting fancier info depends on the fanciness of the tokenizer used. Maximum fanciness probably requires a full language parser. Info beyond code/tokens requires more than just a parser (language server territory).

[–] [email protected] 1 points 7 hours ago

It might be possible to get this using treesitter, though not sure

[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 day ago (2 children)

I'm unsure if that's even possible in C++ for a "normal program" instead of requiring a full-fledged compiler and even maybe a linker, as C++ syntax is completely context-dependent. There's no way to tell if i+=b; increments a value or is actually a dynamic hierarchy cast that prints a message to screen and invokes a vector copy with data downloaded from the internet.

I'd venture there's something in Clang that does this? (clang-tidy, clang-format, who knows), since they implement the syntax tree parser thing.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 18 hours ago

I didn't even think about how context dependent C++ is until you mentioned that. That's a really good point

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 day ago

This is a lot more complicated than I first anticipated. I guess its probably not a common tool then 😅

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 day ago

I wonder if it would be possible to build such a tool on top of tree-sitter (although not sure tree-sitter's C++ grammar can handle modules yet)

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 day ago (1 children)

Maybe count the size of the output of the compiler in bytes? It has done all the work already…

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 day ago

That would only tell me how large each object/asm file is, its not really indicative of the lines of code as it could expand to quite a large size once compiled.

I'm looking for more of an analysis of what has been written and its ratio to the line count.

Thanks for suggesting this, but its not quite what I'm looking for.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 day ago

Probably something written in perl.