Re: assertions: does it matter that they are disabled in production?
on Fri Aug 15 2008, JoshuaMaurice-AT-gmail.com wrote:
it's quite clear that asserts are meant only for debug builds. If only
for consistency with the community at large, use them that way. This
is not an answer to point A vs B. If you want to put in a runtime
check, possibly deep within your program, which returns an error code,
throws an exception, logs a message, kills the program, or some
combination or variation thereof, go for it. You made the normative
judgment that the runtime performance costs are worth this extra
sanity check. Just don't use assert to do it. Use "runtime_assert" or
"logical_assert" or "BOOST_ASSERT" or whatever you want to call it.
You made a good effort to back up and uncover the real issues, but
there's one as-yet-unmentioned linguistic disagreement you didn't deal
with: about half the people in this thread think of the word "assert" as
meaning the thing that comes from the <assert.h> / <cassert> headers,
while the other half have something more general in mind, as in
something like, "any runtime check for programming errors." Until those
two concepts are distinguished, I don't think the debate can lead
anywhere useful.
--
Dave Abrahams
BoostPro Computing
http://www.boostpro.com
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