Cruft

: For the dog show, see Crufts

In Hacker jargon, cruft is redundant, old or improperly written code (computer programming) which needs to be fixed, but tends to stick around. Large software projects invariably accumulate cruft. The concept can be compared to Philip K. Dick s idea of kipple. Cruft is sometimes said to be the software equivalent of dust bunny.

Due to the lack of a precise definition, cruft has also been used in many different contexts to describe code. For example, the FreeBSD handbook refers to stale object code as cruft, which simply implies the code has not been recompiled following an edit. This can cause the BSD-equivalent of DLL hell.

Software engineering methods like Extreme Programming aim to prevent the accumulation of code cruft by continuous Refactoring.

Cruft may also refer to useless junk or excess materials (including obsolete computer hardware) that build up over time and have no value. At least one person has suggested that it stands for Commodity Residue Undergoing Fanciful Transit, since many people seem to like to collect such materials. If you collect such materials from a dumpster, for example, you could say that the material has been crufted, using cruft in its verb form. Also sometime seen is the word cruftyness, which could either refer to something that looks old or decrepit, or a unit of measurement of how old and decrepit something is.

In Massachusetts Institute of Technology slang, cruft has also come to refer to people who spend a lot of time at MIT even though they are no longer students there.

Although the origins of this term are uncertain, it is suggested that the term is derived from Harvard s Cruft Hall, which was the Harvard Physics Department s radar lab during WWII. As late as the early nineties, unused technical equipment could be seen stacked in front of Cruft Hall s windows. This image of undiscarded technical clutter quickly migrated from hardware to software, from which it was even more mind-bogglingly difficult to remove. The word cruft may also be evocative of the terms crust and fluff , both of which may carry connotations of content that is at once extraneous, superfluous, inflexible, or superannuated.

=External links=

*[http://www.jargon.org/html/C/crufty.html Crufty] at the Jargon File *[http://www.cryptonomicon.com/beginning.html In the Beginning...was the Command Line] long article by Neal Stephenson which includes insightful coverage of the cruft concept.