This thread on Hacker News terrifies me

[Steven Schveighoffer]

On 9/1/18 6:29 AM, Shachar Shemesh wrote:
> On 31/08/18 23:22, Steven Schveighoffer wrote:
>> On 8/31/18 3:50 PM, Walter Bright wrote:
>>> https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17880722
>>>
>>> Typical comments:
>>>
>>> "`assertAndContinue` crashes in dev and logs an error and keeps going 
>>> in prod. Each time we want to verify a runtime assumption, we decide 
>>> which type of assert to use. We prefer `assertAndContinue` (and I 
>>> push for it in code review),"
>>
>> e.g. D's assert. Well, actually, D doesn't log an error in production.
>>
> 
> I think it's the music of the thing rather than the thing itself.
> 
> Mecca has ASSERT, which is a condition always checked and that always 
> crashes the program if it fails, and DBG_ASSERT, which, like D's built 
> in assert, is skipped in release mode (essentially, an assert where you 
> can log what went wrong without using the GC needing format).
> 
> When you compare this to what Walter was quoting, you get the same end 
> result, but a vastly different intention. It's one thing to say "this 
> ASSERT is cheap enough to be tested in production, while this DBG_ASSERT 
> one is optimized out". It's another to say "well, in production we want 
> to keep going no matter what, so we'll just ignore the asserts".

Which is exactly what Phobos and Druntime do (ignore asserts in 
production). I'm not sure how the intention makes any difference.

The obvious position of D is that asserts and bounds checks shouldn't be 
used in production -- that is how we ship our libraries. It is what the 
"-release" switch does. How else could it be interpreted?

-Steve