assume, assert, enforce, @safe

[Jonathan M Davis via Digitalmars-d]

On Friday, 1 August 2014 at 22:34:02 UTC, Walter Bright wrote:
> On 8/1/2014 2:50 PM, Jonathan M Davis wrote:
>> Thinking about it, I'm actually wondering if I should use 
>> assertions _more_ so
>> that the compiler might be able to do better optimizations in 
>> -release.
>
> I think this will be a productive strategy once this gets 
> implemented in optimizers.
>
> Of course, using them effectively will not be easy unless one 
> is willing to understand how data flow analysis works and is 
> willing to examine the generated code.

True, but as long as the runtime cost isn't too great for your 
debug builds, having assertions for whatever conditions you think 
your code relies on and would ideally be checked is quite 
beneficial. Any optimizations by the compiler would then be a 
bonus, but the fact that they exist does offset the costs to 
debug builds somewhat (depending on what you're doing) by 
improving the release builds. I would think that any attempt to 
specifically craft assertions to aid the optimizer would be 
something that should generally be left to the cases where you 
really care about getting extra speed out of your program and are 
doing micro-optimizations based on profiling and the generated 
assembly and whatnot.

- Jonathan M Davis