16810, “mppf”, “Should it be possible to disable assert checking?”, “2020-12-03T20:47:10Z”
For https://github.com/Cray/chapel-private/issues/1215
Related to #12466.
Should asserts be always on? Or should it be possible to turn them off (possibly with --fast or with a separate command line flag)?
Typical practice in other programming languages is to provide some way to disable the assertion checks. C, D, Scala, and Python all disable asserts in some configuration (release for D, -DNDEBUG for C, -O for Python, -Xdisable-assertions for Scala).
Having these disabled with --fast (or some other means) will allow performance-minded programmers to feel happy using them in more cases and as a result makes them more useful.