I've seen that before myself at other companies, and it's a shame. A healthy codebase is an investment in the future - if you're not taking the time to cultivate it you're sacrificing long term usability for short term gains. The larger the codebase the more difficult the task, of course, but for us that's just an excuse to solve the next hard problem :).

One more good link on the topic: our use of Clang to find and fix bugs in our existing codebase, as we find new classes of 'gotchas'. http://google-engtools.blogspot.com/2011/05/c-at-google-here...