rake stats M/C column explained

I just spent the better part of an hour trying to figure out what the “M/C” stands for in the output of rake stats.

For those of you at home who have never run rake stats, here’s a sample output:

I wasn’t able to find anyone’s friendly blog post explaining it (or verifying for me what I considered the ‘obvious’ answer) so I guess it’s up to ME to share what I found.

After asking the great and powerful Google in every permutation I could think of including:

"what is the "M/C" in rake stats"
"columns in rake stats"
"columns in "rake stats" rails"
"rake stats explained"
"rake stats "M/C" column"

I finally ended up asking “where is the source file of rake tasks in rails?” which led me through Stack Overflow into the rails/rails repo into a file called statistics.rake which lists the directories rake will scan when running rake stats.

That wasn’t quite what I needed, but this require statement in the actual stats task at the end of the file require "rails/code_statistics" got me the rest of the way to the code_statistics.rb file where I FOUND the answer I had been seeking in the method print_line.

So to end what I’m sure is UNBEARABLE suspense:

YES… it’s the obvious answer. The “M/C” column IS Methods/Classes… they just round all of the fractions to the next lowest integer rather than dealing with floats so even if you have 4.8 it rounds down to 4 which is why the addition in the Total row seems a little off. (Each row is a calculation that rounds any remainder DOWN.)

So THERE. Now we know. I’m sure there will be exuberant rejoicing far and wide.

Perhaps if enough people share this I won’t have to bother with Google SEO to get this answer into the top ten results so that the next person who asks will get an answer instead of a longer search.

~AMP