this post was submitted on 31 Jan 2025
8 points (90.0% liked)

C++

1838 readers
6 users here now

The center for all discussion and news regarding C++.

Rules

founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
[email protected]
[email protected]
[email protected]
8
Are there any tools counting lines of code AND what those lines are doing? (reddthat.com)
submitted 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
11 comments fedilink hide all child comments
 

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!

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] [email protected] 7 points 2 days 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] 2 points 1 day ago (1 children)

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 9 hours ago

Yeah basically C++ is fun (or "fun") in that in order to try and get what code does or what it means you have pretty much no other alternative than trying to compile it.

There are a number of terms that have only one meaning and can appear in only one "semantic place", such as namespace, return and... I think that's it? Maybe (maaaaybe) .*. So it's little enough that doesn't give you that much good information if you try and hand-parse them out from the code you have.

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

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

[–] [email protected] 2 points 9 hours ago

Whch is why the cool thing(TM) nowadays is to use an IDE that has Clang integration, and let the compiler that already compiles your code anyway, do all that sweet statistics job for you.