halt with optional message?

[Vladimir Panteleev]

On Thu, 11 Aug 2011 14:59:03 +0300, Vladimir Panteleev  
<vladimir at thecybershadow.net> wrote:

> I don't see what the problem is. Is your program buggy? Don't use  
> -release. Are you done fixing bugs? Use -release to remove pointless  
> clutter. Is the program segfaulting on a user's PC? Send him a debug  
> build!

By the way, I'd like to add some thoughts on how wrong I think it is to  
rely on a single debugging feature like this in release builds. Asserts  
(both conditional and unconditional), contracts, invariants and native  
language features such as array bounds checking all work together to find  
bugs as soon as possible. If you get an error message on an assert(0) and  
you attempt to debug it from that, you may be led on a wild goose chase,  
because the program might have actually failed much earlier and ran for a  
while in an undetermined state, corrupting memory left and right or  
spreading internal state inconsistencies uncaught by invariants. I know  
about this all too well from my experience of debugging memory corruption  
- the garbage collector is compiled with no invariants as its performance  
is critical, but recompiling my program with a version of Phobos with  
contracts enabled would have saved me tracing a few steps to find the  
source of corruption.

-- 
Best regards,
  Vladimir                            mailto:vladimir at thecybershadow.net