Re: [aspell-devel] Does Anyone Compile Aspell with -DNDEBUG?

[Peter Kümmel]

Kevin Atkinson wrote:
> On Sun, 1 Jun 2008, Peter Kümmel wrote:
>
> > Kevin Atkinson wrote:
> > > If so stop.  Most asserts perform important safety checks and 
> > > disabling them could lead to data corruption and other nasty things.  
> > > Also, they should have a negligible effect on performance.
> >
> > I'm not sure if this is correct, STL checks could be expensive even when
> > optimizing the code.
>
> Can you please show me proof of this.

It is just a impression because I've never heard about such a strategy to
ensure correctness. I only know, in debug mode msvc-stl-code is several
times slower than in release mode, due to disabling optimizations and
executing additional checks.
But a proof would only be a aspell benchmark which I don't have.



> > And using _DEBUG to ensure correct code in release mode is not the common
> > way to use the safety checks.
>
> Crashing is never the correct thing to do, but if there is a bug it may 
> prevent more serious problems down the road.

Yes, I also think a crash is better than to silently ignore it.