kruft

Noun

cruft (uncountable)

1. (slang) Anything that is old or of inferior quality.
   • Students “still think of privacy as ‘the one secret I don’t want revealed,’ and that’s not the problem. Their problem is all the stuff that’s the cruft, the data dandruff, of life, that they don’t think of as secret in any way, but which aggregates to stuff that they don't want anybody to know,”...2014, Jim Dwyer, quoting Eben Moglen, More Awesome Than Money, Viking, →ISBN, pages 26–27
2. (slang) Redundant, old or improperly written code, especially that which accumulates over time.
   • The PEB includes the list of loaded modules (i.e., the EXE and DLLs), the memory containing environment strings, the current working directory, and data for managing the process’ heaps—as well as lots of special-case Win32 cruft that has been added over time.2015 [1992], Andrew S. Tanenbaum, Modern Operating Systems, 4th edition, →ISBN, page 908

   Synonyms:

   clutter

3. (slang) Meaningless or gratuitous content displayed on computer consoles in visual entertainment productions.

See all 5 meanings of cruft