Re: [PATCH COMMITTED] src: Fix NDEBUG compilation: avoid side-effects in assert

[Dan Čermák]

address@hidden (Jose E. Marchesi) writes:

>     
>     on a related note: how about re-defining `assert` to `(void)(cond)` for
>     NDEBUG builds, so that we don't get a plethora of unused variable
>     warnings now?
>
> Hm, is that common practice?  It seems to me that if a given variable is
> only used in an assert, we probably want to identify it so we can
> rewrite the code to avoid that situation.

Usually not automatically, but I've seen the pattern:
#ifdef NDEBUG
UNUSED(val);
#else
assert(val);
#endif

just far too often.

>     
>     Also, are NDEBUG builds actually a good idea? I recall that when fuzzing
>     poke a lot of "crashes" that I found were just failed assertions. So
>     maybe we should refrain from supporting NDEBUG builds for now?
>
> Well, we are not "supporting" NDEBUG, meaning no build mode of poke
> AC_DEFINEs NDEBUG.

Good! I'm not a fan of NDEBUG builds anyway. The security loss is imho
not worth the (usually negligible) performance gain.

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