⚡ rcloc

Your codebase, counted at Rust speed.

A fast, modern source-code counter with familiar cloc accuracy and a cleaner CLI.

$ rcloc --hide-rate --thousands-delimiter=, crates
◉ rcloc 0.2.0
  Fast source insights, powered by Rust

┌──────────────────────┬───────────┬────────────────┬────────────────┬────────────────┐
│ Language             │     files │          blank │        comment │           code │
├──────────────────────┼───────────┼────────────────┼────────────────┼────────────────┤
│ Rust                 │        26 │            864 │          1,471 │          8,208 │
│ HTML                 │         1 │              6 │             48 │            284 │
│ TOML                 │         3 │              5 │              0 │             46 │
├──────────────────────┼───────────┼────────────────┼────────────────┼────────────────┤
│ SUM:                 │        30 │            875 │          1,519 │          8,538 │
└──────────────────────┴───────────┴────────────────┴────────────────┴────────────────┘

Install · Usage · Output formats · Why rcloc? · License

Why rcloc?

rcloc answers a simple question—what is this codebase made of?—without making you wait or decipher a wall of text.

• Fast by default. Native Rust, parallel counting, no interpreter and no runtime dependencies.
• Broad language support. 422 languages across 1,012 extensions, including content-based detection for ambiguous extensions.
• Battle-tested counts. Developed for count parity with the original cloc 2.11.
• Made for humans and scripts. A polished terminal table plus JSON, YAML, CSV, Markdown, XML and SQL.
• More than a counter. Compare directories or Git revisions, inspect individual files, scan archives and customize language definitions.
• Works with real repositories. Respects VCS file lists, filters generated/binary files and removes duplicate content.

In one local benchmark over /usr/share/perl5, rcloc completed in 0.025 s versus 0.786 s for the Perl implementation. Results depend on hardware, filesystem cache and corpus, so treat this as a data point—not a universal promise.

Install

Build from source

You need Rust 1.75 or newer.

git clone https://github.com/cdxy1/rcloc.git
cd rcloc
cargo build --release
./target/release/rcloc .

To put the binary in Cargo's bin directory:

cargo install --path crates/cloc-cli
rcloc .

Usage

Count the current project:

rcloc .

See every file, not just language totals:

rcloc --by-file src

Count only selected languages and format large numbers:

rcloc --include-lang=Rust,TypeScript --thousands-delimiter=, .

Compare two source trees:

rcloc --diff release-1.0 release-2.0

Compare Git revisions:

rcloc --git-diff-all v1.0.0 v2.0.0

Use Git's tracked-file list so build artifacts and ignored files stay out:

rcloc --vcs=git .

Run rcloc --help for the complete option reference.

Output formats

The default report is designed for a terminal. Structured formats keep their stable, decoration-free schemas for pipelines.

Format	Flag	Great for
Text	default	terminals and quick checks
JSON	--json	APIs, jq, CI dashboards
YAML	--yaml	configuration-oriented workflows
CSV	--csv	spreadsheets and data tools
Markdown	--md	pull requests and documentation
XML	--xml	legacy integrations and XSL
SQL	--sql=FILE	storing historical measurements

Write any report directly to a file with --report-file FILE. Use --quiet to remove the text/structured header.

Accuracy and compatibility

At the parity-verified tag, rcloc matched cloc 2.11 exactly across cloc's 345-file test corpus, this repository, /usr/share/vim, the Python 3.12 standard library and /usr/share/perl5.

git checkout parity-verified

That tag contains the upstream reference script and the comparison harnesses used for verification. The current language database lives in data/languages.json; malformed filter definitions fail tests at load time instead of silently producing incorrect counts.

Some surprising upstream counting behavior is intentionally preserved for compatibility—for example, comment scanners do not parse string literals unless the matching compatibility option is enabled. One deliberate improvement is support for non-ASCII filenames in --git-diff-all.

Development

The workspace is intentionally split into small, reusable layers:

Path	Responsibility
crates/cloc-lang	language definitions and comment-filter parsing
crates/cloc-core	walking, classification, counting, deduplication and diffs
crates/cloc-cli	command-line interface and report renderers
data/languages.json	canonical language and extension database

Run the complete suite with:

cargo test --workspace

License and origin

rcloc is an independent Rust port of Al Danial's cloc. It is not affiliated with or endorsed by the upstream author.

The project is licensed under GNU GPL 2.0 or later, matching the upstream licensing requirements. The full terms are in LICENSE, and attribution plus provenance details are recorded in NOTICE. If you distribute a binary, GPL obligations include making the corresponding source available under the same license.

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Less waiting. Better signal. Know your codebase.