Is the D community lacking development tools?

[Jonathan M Davis]

On Friday, May 25, 2012 13:52:05 simendsjo wrote:
> Couldn't dmd automatically add an assert(c) in debug mode before accessing
> members?

That's been argued for ages. Walter is against it, because the OS already 
takes care of it with segfaults. you can either run the program again (which 
isn't necessarily true, but I believe with the programs that he seems to run 
normally, it is, so he's got somewhat of a skewed perspective on that), or if 
you have core dumps enabled, you can just examine the core dump to see what 
happened. Also, adding all of those assertions would also negatively impact 
non-release mode - and possibly by quite a bit, since it would be happening 
all over the place, so there's that to consider.

Regardless, it's a rather devisive subject. I think that _most_ people would 
like to have such assertions added in non-release mode, but since Walter's 
against it, it's never happened.

- Jonathan M Davis