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Date: Fri, 6 Jun 2014 10:40:20 +0200
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From: Pieter Wuille <pieter.wuille@gmail.com>
To: Wladimir <laanwj@gmail.com>
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Cc: Bitcoin Dev <bitcoin-development@lists.sourceforge.net>
Subject: Re: [Bitcoin-development] # error "Bitcoin cannot be compiled
 without assertions." <<<<NOT
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On Fri, Jun 6, 2014 at 10:29 AM, Wladimir <laanwj@gmail.com> wrote:
> On Wed, Jun 4, 2014 at 12:42 PM, Jannis Froese
> <s9jafroe@stud.uni-saarland.de> wrote:
>
>> I think most concerns about the current use of asserts would be resolved
>> if the currently used asserts would be changed to a nicer definition which
>> is independent of NDEBUG, and a second class of debugging asserts would be
>> introduced, which is exclusively for expensive, redundant checks and is
>> disabled by NDEBUG.

There are a few examples of things that would classify as
expensive/redundant checks:
* addrman consistency checks (only enabled with -DDEBUG_ADDRMAN).
* mempool consistency checks (only enabled with -checkmempool).
* deadlock detection (only enabled with -DDEBUG_LOCKORDER).

I'm not sure all of these make sense to put under a single runtime
flag. For example, addrman consistency is unlikely to be affected
unless you're working on addrman code, and is pretty expensive.

Still, I do like the idea of optional consistency checks, that help
guarantee the software always has a consistency state.

-- 
Pieter