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Code Cleanup Culls LibreOffice Cruft
mikejuk writes with an interesting look at what coders can get around to after a few years of creating a free office suite: dealing with many thousands of lines of deprecated code: "Thanks to the efforts of its volunteer taskforce, over half the unused code in LibreOffice has been removed over the past six months. It's good to see this clean-up operation but it does raise questions about the amount of dead code lurking out there in the wild. The scale of the dead code in LibreOffice is shocking, and it probably isn't because the code base is especially bad. Can you imagine this in any other engineering discipline? Oh yes, we built the bridge but there are a few hundred unnecessary iron girders that we forgot to remove... Oh yes, we implemented the new chip but that area over there is just a few thousand transistors we no longer use... and so on." Well, that last one doesn't sound too surprising at all. Exciting to think that LibreOffice (which has worked well for me over the past several years, including under the OpenOffice.org name) has quite so much room for improvement.
There are probably dozens of extra nails that were just hammered in rather than be removed. There are extraneous pieces of lumber.
And a house that was remodeled? I've seen newspaper used as filler. I've seen layers of roofing, with things buried in between layers.
Frankly I don't know what's inside my walls, and I'm not sure I want to know.
Human DNA (and just about every other species as well) is full of things like inactive duplicate genes (some with slight alterations), pieces of old retroviruses, and other mutations and replication errors that have been "commented out". Plus a whole lot of sequences which we don't know what they're good for yet.
A nice engineering example is the stone pylons at each end of the Sydney Harbour Bridge. They were built to support the cranes that were used in constructing the steel arch of the bridge. Since the bridge's completion they've served no structural purpose whatsover.
As the parent poster suggests, it would have cost time and money to remove them. However, in bridge building they plan around that - a bit of extra effort was put in at the start and the pylons were designed and built in such a way that they looked good after the bridge was finished. They were left in place as a feature of the completed structure and, as they were built in sandstone, they do a reasonably good job of making the bridge work visually with the feel of the historic precint beneath the southern end of it.
Dead code rarely adds anything to the aesthetics of software.