assert(0) behavior

[Nick Sabalausky via Digitalmars-d]

On 08/03/2015 11:59 AM, Dicebot wrote:
> General advice  - simply don't ever use -release unless you are _very_
> sure about program correctness (to the point of 100% test coverage and
> previous successful debug runs)

This is very true. I never disable asserts or bounds checking for 
exactly that reason - you can NEVER conclusively determine through 
prerelease testing that none of those conditions are going to get 
tripped in real-world usage. ANY developer who thinks they can is 
absolutely fooling themself. And what happens for the end user WHEN one 
of those conditions does occur? Memory corruption or otherwise invalid 
state. Things go boom. Whee. BAD idea.

There is only ONE time when asserts or bounds checking should EVER be 
disabled and that's on a per-function basis (split it out into a 
separate module if you need to) AFTER profiling has determined that 
specific location to be a significant bottleneck, and the code in 
question has been (and will continue to be during all future 
maintenance) VERY carefully combed-over and peer-reviewed to ensure (as 
much as possible) that disabling asserts/bounds checks on that localized 
function cannot lead to corruption, exploits or invalid state.