Counting Lines of Code

Want some interesting metrics about your code? A nice little Windows utility called LOCmetrics could be just what you are looking for. When preparing for an application source code review, I usually need an estimate for the number of lines of code involved. I've found the numbers provided by development teams can vary significantly from what we actually see when we get the code. That is why I am going to start recommending they run LocMetrics.

LocMetrics has a simple GUI and works with C#, C++, Java, and SQL code. Run LocMetrics and it will dump out physical LOC, executable-physical LOC, and executable-logical LOC. Plus, you get bonus information like number of comment lines, blank lines, cyclomatic complexity (aka McCabe VG complexity) and LOC counts broken down by directory. The most important results are shown in the GUI itself and you get a HTML file containing more detail.

Here's a screen shot of the GUI:

I ran LocMetrics on a few Java libraries for comparison sake. Here are the results.

OWASP AntiSamy 1.3
Lines of Code = 4,576
Executable physical LOC = 1,972Executable logical LOC = 1,444
Cyclomatic complexity = 259
OWASP ESAPI 1.4.2
Lines of Code = 21,263
Executable physical LOC = 8,926
Executable logical LOC = 6,172
Cyclomatic complexity = 1,547

JSE 1.6.0_17 (java.* package only)
Lines of Code = 556,018Executable physical LOC = 200,567
Executable logical LOC = 136,076Cyclomatic complexity = 38,106