Re: Help with create_pipe_bidi

[Joel E. Denny]

On Fri, 4 Sep 2009, Akim Demaille wrote:

> Le 4 sept. 09 à 03:23, Eric Blake a écrit :

> > Fine with me to change that.  The coreutils package now uses more asserts
> > than back when Paul gave his opinion 3 years ago, but it also uses the
> > gnulib module assert which makes it very easy to call ./configure
> > - --disable-asserts, which, like you said, disables all asserts rather
> > easily.

Actually, I think Paul said that.  :)

> I feel uncomfortable with the fact that aver is silent, so I'd prefer that
> aver == assert in !NDEBUG mode, and becomes the original aver implementation
> otherwise.  Something like:
> 
> /* <assert.h>'s assertions are heavyweight and can be disabled too
>   easily, but deliver more information on failure.  So use aver.  See
>   discussions at
>   <http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/bison-patches/2006-01/msg00080.html>
>   <http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/bison-patches/2006-09/msg00111.html>.
>   */
> #if defined NDEBUG
> static inline void
> aver (bool assertion)
> {
>  if (! assertion)
>    abort ();
> }
> #else
> # include <assert.h>
> # define aver assert
> #endif

So how useful would --disable-asserts be for Bison?  Is our goal to hide 
these debugging messages from the end user but not really remove the 
run-time cost?  If not, then maybe aver should just implement assert 
without allowing NDEBUG to affect it.