assume, assert, enforce, @safe

[Jonathan M Davis via Digitalmars-d]

On Friday, 1 August 2014 at 14:10:14 UTC, Sean Kelly wrote:
> On Friday, 1 August 2014 at 08:21:28 UTC, Kagamin wrote:
>> On Thursday, 31 July 2014 at 21:29:59 UTC, Sean Kelly wrote:
>>> So effectively, any factor occurring at runtime.  If I create 
>>> a
>>> library, it is acceptable to validate function parameters 
>>> using
>>> assert() because the user of that library knows what the 
>>> library
>>> expects and should write their code accordingly.  That's fair.
>>
>> He should, but what if he doesn't and the library is phobos or 
>> druntime (which are compiled in release mode)? BTW, druntime 
>> can't use enforce and doesn't verify its input.
>
> Druntime uses contracts and asserts in places. Which are of 
> course removed because we ship only a "release" build.  Once 
> again, the worst naming for a compiler switch ever. What I 
> really want is a way to ship release and non-release builds 
> (ie. checked and unchecked) and have the proper one chosen at 
> link time based on build flags. Basically toss the -defaultlib 
> and -debuglib and replace it with -checkedlib and -uncheckedlib.

Well, to be fair, it's pretty standard practice to remove all 
assertions in release builds in other languages. If anything, 
leaving them in is highly abnormal. Sure, there are reasons to do 
it, but most folks don't. So, while I can see why you don't like 
the switch being called -release, it's behavior matches what most 
people would do for release builds. If anything, I think that 
-debug is the switch that's problematic, because people think 
that it's the opposite of release when it's completely unrelated 
(and useless for most code, because most people aren't going to 
be using debug blocks - especially if they don't understand the 
-debug switch).

But we probably would be better off if none of the switches had 
names like -release or -debug so that folks actually had to 
figure out what they did before using them rather than simply 
assuming that one is for release builds and the other is for 
debug builds.

- Jonathan M Davis