3 ms·

If it never costs you anything, it's just a design decision, not technical debt. Plenty of projects never upgraded C versions, so old C is maybe not technical d

• jwr 7y ago
  No, there is an important difference. It's technical debt because you might have to pay it back, but it might also turn out that you will be switching directions altogether and in that case the debt gets forgiven.
  • humanrebar 7y ago
    All code might need to be tweaked though. Even talking about stable C, the toolchain under it might become unsupported, requiring a port. That means every system include and compiler definition is technical debt.
    • thetedhogan 7y ago
      There's a difference between a toolchain becoming unsupported, and putting a hack around a feature that later becomes obsolete due to business decisions. That hack could certainly be technical debt, up until it isn't. If the code that it was implemented in is no longer used in the future, you didn't incur any cost to it. Not an original idea but I can't remember where I heard the idea. Technical debt is the best kind of debt, because it's the only debt that you might not have to pay back.
      • humanrebar 7y ago
        It doesn't have to be a hack to be technical debt. Anything with a shelf life, even out of date design, has risk and costs. The old python 2 is technical debt even if it wasn't a hack. Something needs to be done, it's just a question of what and when.