This thread on Hacker News terrifies me

[Shachar Shemesh]

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.
> 
> -Steve

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".

Shachar