Re: Assertion vs Exception Handling

From:
"Alf P. Steinbach" <alfps@start.no>
Newsgroups:
comp.lang.c++
Date:
Tue, 16 Mar 2010 11:02:25 +0100
Message-ID:
<hnnkvk$cor$1@news.eternal-september.org>
* Yannick Tremblay:

In article <6d16782c-9284-46de-bbb9-67ff0b4154f1@x12g2000yqx.googlegroups.com>,
James Kanze <james.kanze@gmail.com> wrote:

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.


I'd agree that it is worthwhile to ship code with asserts.

However, I'd disagree that you should not turn on optimisation
shipping code. Compiler optimisation can make a huge difference and
very importantly, it allow the developers to write clear, safe and
maintainable code and let the compiler do it's job. Turning off
compiler optimisation incur the very big risk of programmers trying to
do the copmpiler job and start writing obfuscated code because they
think it will be more efficient.


AOL. Or, as they say nowadays, +1.

Cheers,

- Alf

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