Refers to programming code that is redundant or poorly written. It may also refer to collections of old hardware parts that are obsolete. The term's derivation is unknown, but some think it came from Harvard University's Cruft Laboratory, where discarded equipment had been seen lying around for years.
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| Hacker Slang: cruft |
[very common; back-formation from crufty]
1. n. An unpleasant substance. The dust that gathers under your bed is cruft; the TMRC Dictionary correctly noted that attacking it with a broom only produces more.
2. n. The results of shoddy construction.
3. vt. [from hand cruft, pun on ‘hand craft’] To write assembler code for something normally (and better) done by a compiler (see hand-hacking).
4. n. Excess; superfluous junk; used esp. of redundant or superseded code.
5. [University of Wisconsin] n. Cruft is to hackers as gaggle is to geese; that is, at UW one properly says “a cruft of hackers”.
| Wikipedia: Cruft |
Cruft (occasionally kruft) is computing jargon for "code, data, or software of poor quality".[1] The term may also refer to debris that accumulates on computer equipment. It has been generalized to mean any accumulation of obsolete, redundant, irrelevant, or unnecessary information, especially code.[2]
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The FreeBSD handbook refers to leftover object code which accumulates when code has been changed but the program not recompiled as cruft.[3] Such cruft can cause the BSD equivalent of DLL hell.[citation needed]
In the context of Internet or Web addresses (Uniform Resource Locators or "URLs"), cruft refers to the characters which are only relevant or meaningful to the people who created the site, such as implementation details of the computer system which serves the page. Examples of URL cruft include filename extensions such as .php or .html, and internal organizational details such as /public/ or /~users/john/work/drafts/.
Cruft may also refer to unused and out-of-date computer paraphernalia, collected through upgrading, inheritance, or simple acquisition, both deliberate and through circumstance.
Cruft accumulation will result in technical debt which makes adding new features or modifying existing features (even to improve performance) more difficult and time consuming.
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The origin of the term is uncertain, but it may be derived from Harvard University Cruft Laboratory, which was the Harvard Physics Department's radar lab during World War II. As late as the early 1990s, unused technical equipment could be seen stacked in front of Cruft Hall's windows. According to students, if the place filled with useless machinery is called Cruft Hall, the machinery itself must be cruft. This image of "discarded technical clutter" quickly migrated from hardware to software. Cruft may also be a play on the old typeface form of the letter "s", rendering "crust" as "cruſt". [4]
Another possible origin is that the word evokes the words crust, fluff and scruffy.[1] The latter word is the source of similar words in Jamaican English such as cruff, meaning scurfy, coarse or uncouth.[1]
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