Earlier in the week Novell developer and LibreOffice contributor, Michael Meeks, posted the following graph on his blog.

(Credit: Michael Meeks)

“It seems that over half of our unused code has now bitten the dust. Unfortunately, as we remove more, more wastage tends to be revealed, which explains some of the upward jumps in the graph, nevertheless the trend is clearly down,” wrote Meeks.

LibreOffice uses a tool called callcatcher that identifies the unused methods.

Next time a complex code base is giving you pain, if it doesn’t have over 5000 unused methods, then you are in a better position than the LibreOffice folk were when they started.