OComment

OComment is a fast, byte-preserving comment checker and remover. It reads source bytes without requiring them to be UTF-8, reports every comment it finds, and removes the ones a policy allows it to remove — through a rollback-backed transaction, so a run either applies every edit or none of them.

The production tool is the Rust ocomment binary and the public ocomment-core library. ocomment-ref is an independent OCaml implementation, and the two are compared on the scanner, the classification, the diagnostics, the edits, the transformed bytes, and the source maps. Nothing is shared between them; matching normalized output is the cross-check.

$ ocomment check src
src/main.rs:2:5: removable line comment: // TODO: drop this
Found 1 removable comment in 1 file (1 file scanned). Run `ocomment fix` to remove it.

What it is for

A comment remover is usually wanted for one of three reasons, and OComment is built for all three:

• Shipping less than you wrote. Stripping comments out of a build artifact, a container image, or a vendored copy, without changing what the code does.
• Holding a line in review. A team that has agreed which comments are worth keeping can encode that agreement in .ocomment.toml and let the pre-commit hook or CI enforce it. This repository does exactly that to itself.
• Reading what a file really says. ocomment scan gives the kind, the disposition, and the byte span of every comment, for a tool to consume.

What it will not do

It will not remove a comment that is not commentary. A shebang, an encoding preamble, a build tag, a lint control, an optimiser hint, and a MySQL versioned comment all change what some other program does with the file, and the default policy keeps every one of them. Why was this comment kept? is the page about that, and --explain answers it for any single comment.

It will not corrupt a file it does not understand. The engine never requires the complete source to be UTF-8, so BOMs, CRLF line endings, trailing newlines, and non-UTF-8 bytes outside the edited spans come back exactly as they went in.

Where to go next

• Getting started is the five-minute version.
• Installation lists every channel the tool ships through.
• Commands is the complete CLI reference, generated from the binary.
• Configuration is .ocomment.toml in full.
• Policies and layouts shows what each setting does to one sample file.
• Languages and dialects is what OComment can read.
• Editors and LSP, CI and hooks, and Docker cover the integrations.
• Library and Plugins are for building on it.

OComment is available under either the MIT license or the Apache License 2.0, at your option.