[Bitcoin-development] error "Bitcoin cannot be compiled without assertions." <<<<NOT

[Ron]

________________________________________________________
 Message: 2
 Date: Wed, 4 Jun 2014 08:15:08 -0400
 From: Jeff Garzik <jgarzik at bitpay.com>
 Subject: Re: [Bitcoin-development] # error "Bitcoin cannot
 be compiled
     without assertions." <<<<NOT
 To: Mike Hearn <mike at plan99.net>
 Cc: "bitcoin-development at lists.sourceforge.net"
     <bitcoin-development at lists.sourceforge.net>,
 Ron <rdwnj at yahoo.com>
 Message-ID:
    
 <CAJHLa0PTTHfvd-1BR5s2k-4UW6V6qLEyAbF2YSRxOOSjtH9+_Q at mail.gmail.com>
 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=UTF-8
 
 Yes, check macros like that can be useful.
 
 I like the kernel's policy, which parallels our direction:
 1) Enable and use lightweight assertions for most users.
 2) No assertions with side effects
 
 If you want to compile them out, that's fine, but they
 should always
 be present in production software.
 _____________________________________________________

I don't think many of you actually read what I said, and you went off on your own tangents.

I said:
this commit and code with all side effects removed from the assertions.
in Vol 37, Issue 4

I intentionally left the gcc code alone.  Only the MSC code is assert "fixed".  I would have hoped that someone would have noticed and incorporated these changes into the gcc code.  Simply by removing the #ifdef _MSC_VER ... #else ...  #endif etc. etc.  

Did I say I compiled them out? No!  Did anyone bother to look at my code or what I said?

Here is an example from main.cpp  CTransaction::UpdateCoins(...
-    // add outputs
+    // add outputs      sure looks like an assert with side effects here!?
+#ifdef _MSC_VER
+    bool
+        fTest = inputs.SetCoins(txhash, CCoins(*this, nHeight));
+    #ifdef _DEBUG
+        assert(fTest);
+    #else
+    if( !fTest )
+        releaseModeAssertionfailure( __FILE__, __LINE__, __PRETTY_FUNCTION__ );
+    #endif
+#else
     assert(inputs.SetCoins(txhash, CCoins(*this, nHeight)));
+#endif

Note that I do the test, and if debugging, I let it abort() the program if it fails.  Note that in release mode it calls a new function on failure, that I leave you to discover what it does.  I see that this assert has been "fixed" in 0.9.x, but I think my "fix" is better, since it allows release mode code to run better, if not identically.

I changed every assert() in the bitcoind 086 sources to behave this way.  Since C++ is perniciously baroque, it is not clear if a side effect can or has occurred in the most innocuous of C++ statements. Is the example above side-effect free?

Here is a piece of what I made my decision on:
http://www.gnu.org/software/libc/manual/html_node/Consistency-Checking.html and the link to the book previously given.

Also, no one answered the question about bitcoin-qt, to whit, can or should it be compiled in RELEASE mode because of this?  Should it have always been compiled in DEBUG mode in the past too?

Ron