Comparison
Dead codevsLava flow
Dead code
you changed the function, everything passed, and it turned out nothing had called it for a year.
Code that is never executed, or is executed and whose result is never used. It is more expensive than it looks: it is read during every investigation, updated during every refactor and upgraded during every dependency bump, all for nothing. Coverage tools and dead-code analysis find most of it, and the only reliable way to stop it accumulating is to delete on sight rather than comment out.
Full entry →Lava flow
the old implementation is still there behind a flag nobody has turned on since the migration two years ago.
Dead or obsolete code that has hardened into the codebase because nobody is confident enough to remove it. It grows out of unfinished migrations and abandoned experiments, and it costs on every read, every search and every dependency upgrade. The cure is deletion plus version control, and the reason it does not happen is that nobody is rewarded for it.
Full entry →