4 ms·
I don't understand - wouldn't this be observable by the person making the change? They used to call this function / use this class and now they don't any more?
by robertlagrant 3mo ago
I don't understand - wouldn't this be observable by the person making the change? They used to call this function / use this class and now they don't any more? Even if it's inside a conditional compilation block.
- wmedrano 3mo agoThe hard to detect is the compilers technical reason for not doing the analysis. Maybe it will one day. In practice, it's annoying to track if those small util functions become dead code.
- zdragnar 3mo agoThat requires a person to be making that change. If the change is vibe coded and the person is only checking that the tests pass, it's not hard for cruft to accumulate.
- dnautics 3mo agoi did not say "Impossible to detect"! in practice the exponential explosion of options may become intractable. lets say you have 10 compilation flags with 10 options each. not syre you want the compiler scanning through all that on each pass
- robertlagrant 3mo agoYes - I was only talking about when a person removes some code from use, removing the code as well as the call to the code. I wasn't meaning the compiler at all (although it would be nice if the compiler could autodetect it, as you say, that could become tricky).