This can’t stop me because I don’t even know any of my code well enough to think whether it’s useless in the first place!
This is why I love the “find usages” inspection, though the IDE (at least JetBrains ones) will usually preemptively warn you about unused methods and functions.
If it’s a block of logic in the middle of a function that you suspect is no longer needed, set a breakpoint in it and run the program before deleting it just to make sure it’s not being triggered.
Deeper down the rabbit hole, more dangerous “useless” blocks of code won’t be found with “find usages” because the usage either:
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isn’t in the project, and is external. Like a powershell script calling a function present in the DLL, or your system’s equivalent. Or even hardware accessing it directly at a known address, like an IRQ table
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is accessed via reflection, which the IDE won’t know about
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for bonus points, the linker depends on it to make a functioning binary. Or some other dodgy code may break at runtime if offset from its original location in the binary…
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That’s why we comment first, then use version controls. Also we never test in prod.
ROFL yeah right!
Fortunately:
- I quit the editor without saving the changes
- I have a previous version that still contains the block in question
- I have a few onions on which I can blame my tears
Oof, just did that a couple of days ago, in prod no less (not able to test particular change in lower envs). Good times.
