Cruft

Cruft

Cruft is jargon for computer software or hardware that is of poor quality. The term originates from source code that is rewritten leaving irrelevant or unwanted data within the code.

Contents

History

Harvard Cruft Laboratory

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".[1]

Another possible origin is that the word evokes the words crust, fluff and scruffy. The latter word is the source of similar words in Jamaican English such as cruff, meaning scurfy, coarse or uncouth.

Computer software

The FreeBSD handbook uses the term to refer to leftover object code that accumulates when code has been changed but the program not recompiled.[2] Such cruft can cause the BSD equivalent of Dependency Hell.[citation needed]

In the context of Internet or Web addresses (Uniform Resource Locators or "URLs"), cruft refers to the characters which are relevant or meaningful only 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/.[3]

Computer hardware

Cruft may also refer to unused and out-of-date computer paraphernalia, collected through upgrading, inheritance, or simple acquisition, both deliberate and through circumstance.[4] Cruft accumulation may result in technical debt (which could make adding new features or modifying existing features - even to improve performance - more difficult and time consuming). This accumulated hardware, however, often has benefit when IT systems administrators, technicians, and the like have need for critical replacement parts. A similar, though unused, machine or component to a production unit could result in near-immediate restoration of failed unit, as opposed to waiting for shipment from spare vendor.

See also

References

External links


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  • cruft together — v. To haphazardly build an ugly yet functional object. Hence cruftsmanship , the antithesis of craftsmanship. Example Citation: [MS DOS was] crufted together in 6 weeks by hacker Tim Paterson...who is said to have regretted it ever since. From… …   New words

  • cruft — noun a) Anything old or of inferior quality. b) Redundant, old or improperly written code, especially that which accumulates over time; clutter …   Wiktionary

  • cruft — m? ( es/ as) crypt [L] …   Old to modern English dictionary

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  • Cruft's — UK [krʌfts] / US a competition for dogs that takes place every year in the UK …   English dictionary

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