Comment by cyphar

I know that Solaris (or at least, ZFS) has VERIFY and ASSERT macros where the ASSERT macros are compiled out in production builds. Is that the kind of thing you're referring to?

You can aslo mark certain codepaths as unreachable to hint to the compiler that it can make certain optimisations (e.g., "this argument is never negative"), but if you aren't validating that the assumption is correct I wouldn't call that an assertion -- though a plain reading of your comment would imply you would still call this an "assertion"? AFAIK, no language calls this construct "assert".

This is probably one of those "depends on where you first learned it" bits of nomenclature, but to me the distinction here is between debug assertions (compiled out in production code) and assertions (always run).