Shall we remove dead code?

[cernoch]

A coverage report suggests that many functions are not used. Should they be kept?

[horenmar]

I went through some of the code, and here is what I think

• ComponentCache
  • deleteEntries is reported unused, but potentially can be called from ComponentCache::storeAsEntry.
  • debug_dump_data is uncalled and the only call is commented out, we might instead want to make it dependent on verbosity settings
  • reHashTable is uncalled, but seems to be uncalled only because there was no need for rehashing (considerCacheResize is called)
  • removeFromDescendantsTree uncalled because deleteEntries is uncalled...
• main.cpp -- I would delete the commented out code at the end of main.
• BasePackedComponent::outbit -- As far as I can tell, this is not used anywhere, even conditionally or commented out. Delete!
• Instance
  • Commented out deleteConflictClauses -- Delete!
  • compactConflictLiteralPool, markClauseDeleted and isAntecedentOf seem to be another conditionally uncalled method, that would be called with a better test suite.

Generally I suggest removing blocks of commented out code, including obsoleted methods, (e.g. AltComponentAnalyzer::searchThreeClause or ComponentArchetype::makeComponentFromState), but we should be very careful with methods that are only conditionally uncalled.

[cernoch]

I agree with all the points.

Over the past week I've been trying to understand the code a bit more: The removeFromDescendantsTree function might be related to the memory leaks. Deleting this function might make our life harder if the memory leaks were to be fixed.