assume, assert, enforce, @safe

[Ary Borenszweig via Digitalmars-d]

On 7/31/14, 4:54 PM, H. S. Teoh via Digitalmars-d wrote:
> On Thu, Jul 31, 2014 at 07:39:54PM +0000, Jonathan M Davis via Digitalmars-d wrote:
>> On Thursday, 31 July 2014 at 19:36:34 UTC, H. S. Teoh via Digitalmars-d
>> wrote:
>>> On Thu, Jul 31, 2014 at 03:43:48PM -0300, Ary Borenszweig via
>>> Digitalmars-d wrote:
> [...]
>>>>>> What do you suggest to use to check program bugs?
>>>>>
>>>>> assert()
>>>>
>>>> Then you are potentially releasing programs with bugs that are of
>>>> undefined behavior, instead of halting the program immediately.
>>>
>>> Isn't that already what you're doing with the current behaviour of
>>> assert? Not only in D, but also in C/C++.
>>
>> Yes, but I think that his point was that he wants a way to check
>> programming bugs in release mode, and Walter was saying not to use
>> enforce for checking programming bugs. So, that leaves the question of
>> how to check them in release mode, since assertions won't work in
>> release mode. But the answer to that is normally to not compile in
>> release mode. And I believe that dmd gives enough control over that
>> that you can get everything that -release does without disabling
>> assertions using flags other than -release.
> [...]
>
> Ah, I see.
>
> But doesn't that just mean that you shouldn't use -release, period?
> AFAIK, the only thing -release does it to remove various safety checks,
> like array bounds checks, asserts, contracts (which are generally
> written using asserts), etc.. I'd think that Ary wouldn't want any of
> these disabled, so he shouldn't use -release at all. There's already -O
> and -inline to enable what people generally expect from a release build,
> so -release wouldn't really be needed at all.
>
> Right?
>
>
> T
>

That's exactly my point, thank you for summing that up :-)

I don't see the point of having a "-release" flag. It should be renamed 
to "-a-bit-faster-but-unsafe".

I think there are other languages that do quite well in terms of 
performance without disabling bounds checks and other stuff.