assert semantic change proposal

[Ary Borenszweig via Digitalmars-d]

On 8/5/14, 3:55 PM, H. S. Teoh via Digitalmars-d wrote:
> On Tue, Aug 05, 2014 at 11:18:46AM -0700, Jeremy Powers via Digitalmars-d wrote:

> Furthermore, I think Walter's idea to use asserts as a source of
> optimizer hints is a very powerful concept that may turn out to be a
> revolutionary feature in D.

LLVM already has it. It's not revolutionary:

http://llvm.org/docs/LangRef.html#llvm-assume-intrinsic

By the way, I think Walter said "assert can be potentially used to make 
optimizations" not "Oh, I just had an idea! We could use assert to 
optimize code". I think the code already does this. Of course, we would 
have to look at the source code to find out...

By the way, most of the time in this list I hear "We could use this and 
that feature to allow better optimizations" and no optimizations are 
ever implemented. Look at all those @pure nosafe nothrow const that you 
have to put and yet you don't get any performance boost from that.