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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.
Not always. Aren't the Germans huge fans of homeopathy?
Some of them also have very questionable taste in style. Just look at some of their wacky-looking cars; compare a top-of-the-line Porsche to any Ferrari, for instance. The Italians have been the masters of automobiles as art for quite some time, but Porsches and BMWs usually have very bad proportions. BMW's sedans look good, but every time they try to make a sports car it just looks weird, and they do much better when they stick to making the engine and supplying it to someone else, like with the McLaren F1. A lot of VWs have rather questionable styling too. But the Mercedes cars are a giant exception to all this; those are some of the best-looking cars out there, short of the Ferraris. I wonder if the Germans styling those cars come from a different region of the country, or if they outsource their design.
Unused memory is wasted memory. Windows 7 intentionally uses as much memory as possible if it's available rather than paging during application use. I wouldn't be surprised if competing operating systems like OS X behaved similarly. If something ends up needing that memory, the operating system will happily give it away. It's silly that your argument constantly reappears in various online forums, because it signifies a lack of knowledge about how modern memory management actually works.