On Wednesday, 6 August 2014 at 08:25:38 UTC, Walter Bright wrote:
4. everyone who wants faster assert optimizations will have to rewrite their (possibly extensive) use of asserts that we'd told them was best practice. I know I'd be unhappy about having to do such to my D code.
Also having the same syntax for both kinds of assert makes it easier to try unsafe optimizations: the code can be written safe, then unsafe optimizations can tried effortlessly and performance gains evaluated. In C one would only need to edit the macro to do this. Whether we want to allow such experiments is debatable, but I find it at least reasonable. One may also want the optimizations to propagate backwards for even more performance - this would be a different kind of optimization, which may or may not require yet another syntax.
