On Sunday, 28 September 2014 at 22:00:24 UTC, Walter Bright wrote:
I can't get behind the notion of "reasonably certain". I certainly would not use such techniques in any code that needs to be robust, and we should not be using such cowboy techniques in Phobos nor officially advocate their use.
I think it's a fair stance not to advocate this approach. But as it is I spend a good portion of my time diagnosing bugs in production systems based entirely on archived log data, and analyzing the potential impact on the system to determine the importance of a hot fix. The industry seems to be moving towards lowering the barrier between engineering and production code (look at what Netflix has done for example), and some of this comes from an isolation model akin to the Erlang approach, but the typical case is still that hot fixing code is incredibly expensive and so you don't want to do it if it isn't necessary. For me, the correct approach may simply be to eschew assert() in favor of enforce() in some cases. But the direction I want to be headed is the one you're encouraging. I simply don't know if it's practical from a performance perspective. This is still developing territory.
