On Friday, 1 August 2014 at 22:34:02 UTC, Walter Bright wrote:
On 8/1/2014 2:50 PM, Jonathan M Davis wrote:
Thinking about it, I'm actually wondering if I should use
assertions _more_ so
that the compiler might be able to do better optimizations in
-release.
I think this will be a productive strategy once this gets
implemented in optimizers.
Of course, using them effectively will not be easy unless one
is willing to understand how data flow analysis works and is
willing to examine the generated code.
True, but as long as the runtime cost isn't too great for your
debug builds, having assertions for whatever conditions you think
your code relies on and would ideally be checked is quite
beneficial. Any optimizations by the compiler would then be a
bonus, but the fact that they exist does offset the costs to
debug builds somewhat (depending on what you're doing) by
improving the release builds. I would think that any attempt to
specifically craft assertions to aid the optimizer would be
something that should generally be left to the cases where you
really care about getting extra speed out of your program and are
doing micro-optimizations based on profiling and the generated
assembly and whatnot.
- Jonathan M Davis
