alt Hacker News> Can assertions be used in production?
Yes
> What should I be asserting on?
Invariants
> Can I customize how assert behaves?
It should abort the program, logging the stack and whatever the context you pass into in, printf-style. If it doesn't abort, it just buries the issue of the program being in incorrect internal state. It should never be OK.
I think part of the problem is that assert is used for different things.
You can use assert to cover a case that should never happen, you can also use assert to catch programming errors during development.
It's arguable that you don't want the second group in a production build. That should have been caught in testing.
But then there's the use where it's a lazy person's if statement. Instead of dealing with the issue assert it. I'm undecided whether this is a net good. Would the test have been implemented anyway?