Discussion
Just for fun, I had Claude Code figure out how to run the ~2001-era Perl and C SLOCCount program in WebAssembly in the browser, complete with a UI for counting source code lines from pasted text, a GitHub repository or a zip file
https://simonwillison.net/2025/Oct/22/sloccount-in-webassembly/
Here's an animated demo
@simon ha! That’s super cool! I may have found a bug trying to run this against stadiamaps/ferrostar. I’m *pretty* sure there are more source code files than this in the repo, and it should have similar amounts of Swift and Kotlin; the core is Rust but there’s also a lot of mobile code 🤔
@ianthetechie yeah sadly it's limited to counting code in languages that existed when the code was written in 2001!
@simon that was my first thought too, and I know Swift and Kotlin didn’t exist then… but I’m a bit surprised to see Rust and TypeScript there 🧐
The alt text for that GIF was mostly written by Claude - I told it to split the GIF into frames and describe it based on that, so it fired up ImageMagick using its (relatively new) code interpreter capability and sampled just enough frames to figure out what was happening: https://claude.ai/share/135013a3-00a3-4bc6-bc6d-7c889f960cda
I would imagine enterprise teams at financial institutions have tried experimenting with refactoring their 45 year old code on mainframes.
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