In my quest to rid Firefox of code that doesn’t do anything it is possible to screw up and delete a method that is only used by outside code. So far, I’ve hit a component that isn’t used in Firefox, methods that aren’t used in Firefox and methods that claim someone is about to use them (with a timestamp from 8 years ago). That and I discovered some code only appears to be used from BeOS or OS/2 specific ifdefs.

Not surprisingly, I had someone comment that I do some “dangerous shit”. Sure, I can see why someone would think that.

My protection: I use the try server to make sure that everything builds on supported platforms. On top of that every patch gets reviewed.

Furthermore, I would like to point out that methods that aren’t called within Firefox are less likely to be tested and correct. So if one leaves code that should only be called from other projects, it’d be appropriate if we had some unit tests for it, which would flag the code as in-use. That would let us move to the next level and setup a tinderbox to detect dead code as soon as it is orphaned.