Cruft

For the dog show, see Crufts

In hacker jargon, cruft is redundant, old or improperly written code 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 bunnies.

Software engineering methods like "Extreme Programming" aim to prevent the accumulation of code cruft by continous refactoring.

Cruft may also refer to useless junk or excess materials (including obsolete computer hardware) that build up over time and have no value.

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

External links

• Cruft at the Jargon File
• In the Beginning...was the Command Line long article by Neal Stephenson which includes insightful coverage of the "cruft" concept.