alt Hacker News> There's nothing unexpected in the snippet posted.
> The issue is cause by C declaring that dereferencing a null pointer is UB. It's not really an issue with assertions. > You can get the same optimisation-removes-code for any UB.
I disagree - It’s a 4 line toy example but in a 30-40 line function these things are not always clear. The actual problem is if you compile with NDEBUG=1, the nullptr check is removed and the optimiser can (and will, currently) do unexpected things.
The printf sample above is a good example of the side effects.
> The actual problem is if you compile with NDEBUG=1
That is entirely expected by any C programmer. Sure they named things wrong - it should have been something like `assert` (always enabled) and `debug_assert` (controlled by NDEBUG), as Rust did. And I have actually done that in my C++ code before.
But I don't think the mere fact that assertions can be disabled was the issue that was being alluded to.