SLOC — Source Lines of Code - mehen

SLOC (Source Lines of Code) is the total count of physical lines in a source file, including code, comments, and blank lines. It is the simplest possible size metric.

What mehen emits

Key	Type	Description
`loc.sloc`	int	Total physical lines in the file.
`loc`	int	Alias for `loc.sloc`.

How it is computed

mehen counts physical lines in the source bytes — every newline-terminated region is one line. Files that do not end with a newline still count the trailing fragment.

When it is useful

Repository-level dashboards: total SLOC is a coarse but stable size signal.
Trend reports: SLOC delta is what most engineering organizations track week over week.
Sanity checking PR size: if a PR adds 5,000 SLOC, that’s worth a comment.

SLOC is not a quality metric. A 50-line file can be more complex than a 500-line one. Use SLOC alongside PLOC, LLOC, Cyclomatic complexity, and Cognitive complexity.

References

Park, R. E. (1992). Software Size Measurement: A Framework for Counting Source Statements. CMU/SEI-92-TR-20. SEI report.
Nguyen, V., Deeds-Rubin, S., Tan, T. & Boehm, B. (2007). A SLOC Counting Standard. USC. USC PDF.
Sonar: ncloc in metric definitions.

See also

LOC family — overview of all five LOC variants.
PLOC — instruction lines only.
LLOC — logical (statement) lines.