alt Hacker NewsI can see the appeal of having 'code as documentation' in header files, but personally I find any type of runtime asserts to be too heavy handed. Graceful error handling, in my opinion, is always preferable. This type of functionality is what is continuing to drive me away from C++. If your preconditions and postconditions matter, document them in a comment block.
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ahartmetz • today at 2:04 PM
You can set a "contract evaluation semantic" for contracts. One of them is "observe", which only prints a message on contract violations. With "ignore", nothing at all happens.
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Graceful handling is a trade off. Sometimes the check is expensive, if everybody normally does it right you don't want to check (particularly in a tight loop), but you don't want to lose this. I work in embedded, in production our CPUs are not powerful enough to risk all those runtime checks, but I want to turn them on when I work on my workstation - in hopes that if there is a problem we catch it.
Contacts are also a guaranteed syntax. Runtime checks provide no way for tools to know if the condition is expected to never happen - this is a bug; vs this is a normal user error we need to check for. A contract means theorem provers can find code paths where a bug could happen - of course we don't have theorem provers for C++, but this is seen as a requirement to get them.