Re: Assertion vs Exception Handling

From:

James Kanze <james.kanze@gmail.com>

Newsgroups:

comp.lang.c++

Date:

Mon, 15 Mar 2010 15:53:32 -0700 (PDT)

Message-ID:

<6d16782c-9284-46de-bbb9-67ff0b4154f1@x12g2000yqx.googlegroups.com>

On Mar 14, 12:41 am, Branimir Maksimovic <bm...@hotmail.com> wrote:

On Sun, 14 Mar 2010 00:36:20 -0000"Leigh Johnston" <le...@i42.co.uk> wrote:

Using performance as a criterion on whether or not to use
asserts make the asserts completely arbitrary and pointless.
Like I said earlier you need to be either extremely
defensive or not defensive at all and the degree of
defensiveness depends on the application domain. It is
simpler to just except the truth that "asserts are *mostly*
a debugging tool".

How's that that C and C++ folks always worry about
performance, while Java folks don;t worry? All my apps run
with debug builds and asserts and are lot faster then Java
apps. If you got the point ;)

:-)

Most C++ folks don't worry that much about performance. Or
rather, they only worry about it in the few places where it
counts. And judging from the many companies I've worked with,
it's extremely rare to ship code compiled with optimization
turned on or asserts turned off.

(Of course, there are times when speed is critical, and in such
cases, you do what you have to do.)

--
James Kanze