I wanted some second opinions on an idea I had for D before I
made a bugzilla issue.
Currently in D, to have a statement run only in debug mode, you
can mark it with the debug keyword. But, there is currently no
way to mark a statement so that it only runs in release. So what
I propose is a release statement like so:
debug {
// only runs when -debug is given
}
release {
// only runs when -release is given
}
Or, if adding a new keyword to the language is a no go, it could
be done like so:
debug {
// only runs when -debug is given
} else {
// only runs when -release is given
}
I have run into a need for this twice in one day, both having to
do with unit tests in phobos. For the first one, I needed a way
to make sure that a function is @nogc in release. For the other,
the function I was tested had different outputs for release and
debug if the input was an empty range, and I had no way to test
both cases.
I can think of several other use cases off the top of my head.
One, If you have a GUI application that checks for a serial
number on startup, there's no reason to do that check in a debug
build. Or, if your making a game, there's no reason to do the
opening logo crawl before the menu if your using debug mode.
A rebuttal to this might be to just use version and pass
something in during compilation. The problem that I have is this
is not a solution for the phobos code that I am working on. Also,
I think the first example above is very clear code and follows
the debug statement's precedent.
