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Legacy code isn't always bad. All code becomes legacy code. Poor legacy code is a liability, and legacy code that leads to suboptimal technical situations (e.g
by pwnstigator 17y ago
Legacy code isn't always bad. All code becomes legacy code.
Poor legacy code is a liability, and legacy code that leads to suboptimal technical situations (e.g. using C++ in 2009) is a pain.
- nickelplate 17y agoWhat's wrong with using C++ in 2009?
- prodigal_erik 17y agoIt gives up all possible safety for performance gains that haven't mattered on the desktop for years. "volatile" is not enough of a memory model to write portable threaded code for I/O bound multicore machines. And it's missing an awful lot of modern conveniences that are painful or unreliable without language support: AOP, closures, currying, invariants, reflection, serialization, remoting, extensible syntax.
- gaius 17y agoEchoing the commenter above, people writing C++ in 2009 are laughing all the way to the bank.
- HeyLaughingBoy 17y agoI don't know about laughing all the way to the bank, but I would probably have more difficulty writing machinery control code in anything other than C++
- blasdel 17y agoAll legacy code is a liability, and all code is legacy.
- prodigal_erik 17y agoTo me "legacy" connotes flawed, not merely old. If a rewrite would end up slightly modernized but basically the same, what you have is an investment. If a rewrite would end up completely different because the old version doesn't meet the current requirements, what you have is a legacy problem.
- access_denied 17y agoYou are distinguishing between "legacy" and "legacy problem" and thus rendering your own opening 'thesis as moot.
- prodigal_erik 17y agoSorry, what I was trying to get across is that I don't expect to hear "legacy" unless there's a problem.