[daliwali]

At my work, I have a somewhat clever (or idiotic) technical solution to the problems of feature flags: they are actually implemented as feature modules that monkey-patch the base application in runtime.

There are a few benefits: removing features is dead simple, just delete the whole feature module, and there's no conditional branching in the base application.

There are some drawbacks too: the base application must have entry points for the feature modules to overwrite. Usually the default values are no-op or some default behavior. Features also must implement setup and teardown, which can take longer to write than a conditional.

[slaymaker1907]

That sounds kind of complicated to reason about and thus pretty dangerous for feature flags. At my work, we use them to do partial rollbacks in case the new feature/behavior has unintended consequences. Deployments might take weeks to complete globally, so doing a hotpatch or code rollback is incredibly expensive compared to toggling a feature.