2009.02.06 04:39 "Re: [Tiff] assertions, and building with DEBUG/NDEBUG", by Phillip Crews

I have not heard of a build production process for open-source based systems which intentionally disables assertions. More than likely they are disabled in quite a few closed-source applications.

It has always been my practice and assumption that assertions should be disabled in production software where performance and appropriate error handling is considered important.

Perhaps open-sourced operating systems are not really production software. :-)

My own software contains quite a lot of assertion statements but the performance boost from removing them was only a few percent.

For me, the real problems with leaving assertions in production builds are:

1. Failures do not generate production-quality error messages.
2. The action taken is platform-dependent and not always helpful to users.

In a library like libtiff, it is inappropriate to abort the calling program when an assertion is triggered, which a failed assert() does on many platforms.

In my code, I use my own macro, which is defined as assert() in debug builds, but in release builds calls an internal logging routine and continues. If a severe problem or crash occurs later because of the bad value, I have information to go on in the log.