On 2/26/11 4:08 PM, Magnus Lie Hetland wrote:
On 2011-02-26 15:20:19 +0100, David Nadlinger said:
On 2/26/11 1:15 PM, Jonathan M Davis wrote:
[...] And from a perfectly practical standpoint, as soon as your code
ends
up in a library, assertions are generally useless anyway,[...]
I don't quite think asserts are useless in libraries. If you need to
care about performance in a library, you hit cases quite frequently
where sanity-checking the input would be too expensive to be done in
release mode, and thus you can't specify behavior on invalid input as
part of your API using exceptions. Nevertheless, it is still useful to
people using your library to get notified when they are messing
something up as early as possible in debug mode, which is precisely
what asserts are made for, at least in my opinion.
But that would only work if they had access to the source, or a version
not compiled in release mode, right?
True, but as shipping debug libraries and headers is precisely what SDKs
are for, I don't see much of a problem there. Heck, even Microsoft's C
Runtime comes with an extra debug version…
David
