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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technical_debt

basically it's when a bunch of bad but seemingly-innocuous coding design decisions accumulate and compound each other multiplicatively over time, to the point that any change of the code is far more likely to break something than the new feature is worth

Or as I stated at a previous job where I complained about the 40-minute-long test-suite run time that was bogging everyone down, "the road to a 40 minute long test suite is paved with a couple extra seconds here and there with every new code commit"

Why not just make a conscious decision to stop developing new features and dedicate all the effort to refactoring then?
A few reasons. If you're an employee building a product for a company, management's always going to push for features, features, features, to keep the customers happy, and to keep up with the competition. Time spent refactoring is an investment in the future, but management tends to be more shortsighted than that. By the time that you really can't add more to the program, it's years down the line, and they've probably been considering pulling the plug anyhow.

In my own projects, it's often fun to keep adding things until I hit a roadblock, then spend a couple weeks reworking stuff. It's satisfying to add new features, but architectural maintenance feels like treading water.

So, I'd guess that the answer is somewhere between "outside factors dictate that there isn't time" and "we haven't decided to make the time, even though we could".

There's an interview with the two main developers here, from 5 years ago: https://sourceforge.net/blog/potm-201301/

It sounds like they ran out of energy to really rearchitect the whole thing, or build a new one from scratch.

> If you're an employee building a product for a company, management's always going to push for features

What company? What management? What customers? What features? Are we still talking about DOSBox?

No; I was speaking more generally about some potential reasons that software wouldn't be kept in a low-debt state. The same concepts could apply to Dosbox with some remapping.

What company? The Dosbox project itself.

What management? The devs making overall decisions for the direction of the project.

What customers? Anyone requesting new features and fixes in the software.

What features? Built-in support for Munt, new networking support, support for more varieties of peripheral hardware...

It made sense to me to give a more general explanation, since this thread started off with a question about what technical debt is in the first place. I also did my best to address Dosbox's specific reasons by posting the interview with their devs and providing my own interpretation of it.

As others have hinted, the best path to better code is

1) have a good test suite and test coverage to ensure that any code refactoring hasn’t broken other or expected functionality

2) spend the time to rethink the design of some piece and refactor that, deploy and watch for unexpected bugs

3) repeat until the code is up to date

The problem is nontechnical management that doesn’t even understand why it’s important to revisit old code in this way instead of constantly coming out with new features. It is just seen as an unnecessary cost, even though the crufty state of the code has been slowing the whole team down. (Disclaimer: I have been in this exact situation. The founders ended up selling out and leaving.)

Could be various reasons - the original people aren't there, or more likely the amount of free time people have to work on dosbox is not very big. Then, when people try and develop, the tech debt makes everything slow, even paying off that same debt.
That is the solution, but sometimes it's a hard decision to make.
Clear and to the point for this non-techie: thank you!
It is a term used by people with hindsight to depict bad decision making in programming that needs a lot of fixing and refactoring later on. And to insinuate they are more cautious.
It's very hard to avoid tech debt if you're under constant and severe deadline pressure. But I don't consider it at all hard to avoid otherwise. To me, avoiding debt can be summarized as not taking shortcuts. This shortcut would save time right now, but you know its a hack that makes an abstraction leak? Don't do it. You know an approach is going to cause problems down the line, but you just can't think of a better way? Again, don't do it. See if something comes to mind later. Wrote and tested a bunch of code that seems to work, but there's an itch in the back of your mind saying you haven't thought the problem all the way through? Don't check it in. One might think this sort of approach is paralyzing or something, but in my experience it's extremely empowering over the lifetime of a software project.
You act like you always know what will become debt and even then what will become important debt.
We don’t know much. We have to make calls. What can I say? I’m old and I have my heuristics.
It doesn't have to be with hindsight, you can forecast technical debt.
So true. Often technical debt is intentionally taken on as a calculated risk to get to market faster with the intention of fixing it later. Fixing it later rarely happens though. In my experience it either ends up being someone else's problem or you just live with it.