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Code Cleanup Culls LibreOffice Cruft

Posted by timothy on from the let's-just-call-them-introns dept.

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.

3 of 317 comments (clear)

  1. Worked Well? by Oxford_Comma_Lover · · Score: -1, Troll

    Last time I tried it--which was less than six months ago--OpenOffice was still unstable enough on a windows installation that it crashed about thirty seconds after opening a document, every time.

    Its reputation has gotten a lot better over the years, so I assume there are people it works well for. But I couldn't recommend it over Word where reliability is an issue.

    --
    -- IANAL, this isn't legal advice, and definitely isn't legal advice for you. Also, Squee!
  2. Re:oooh yes by s0litaire · · Score: -1, Troll

    Let me get this straight...

    So you took a "Live" database
    You played around with the code around it
    You didn't know what you were doing,
    You deleted some of that code,
    Database went down.
    The users who relied on the Database could not use it as you Buggered it up...
    and you're blaming the manager for being annoyed that you "broke working code"?

    Think you need to see a shrink about your memory lapses!

    You were FIRED, you didn't quit!!

    --
    Laters Sol "Have you found the secrets of the universe? Asked Zebade "I'm sure I left them here somewhere"
  3. Re:It doesn't matter by epyT-R · · Score: 0, Troll

    ok.. turn off superfetch and disable prefetch.. win7 x86_64 still eats 400-500MB. it's still bloated.