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.
Way too many times I deleted “unused” functions on which the entire system depended.
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.
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!
