On 22/09/2016 05:28, Nicholas Nethercote wrote:
Greetings,
Assertions, such as MOZ_ASSERT, are great. But they only run in debug builds.
Release assertions, such as MOZ_RELEASE_ASSERT, run in all builds.
I want to highlight a nice case where converting a normal assertion
into a release assertion was a win. In bug 1159244 Michael Layzell did
this in nsTArray::ElementAt(), to implement a form of always-on array
bounds checking. See
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1159244#c55 for
discussion of how this is finding real bugs in the wild. (As well as
identifying new bugs, it's also helping understand existing crash
reports, e.g. see bug 1291082 where the crash signature changed.)
Obviously we can't convert every normal assertion in the codebase into
a release assertion. But it might be worth thinking about which normal
assertions are good candidates for conversion. Good candidates include
any assertion where the consequence of failure is dangerous, e.g.
might cause memory access violations.
Nick
Yes please. This + diagnostic assert also helps frontend people who
build and run opt builds (because debug builds are too slow to be
usable, especially when combined with the browser toolbox (JS
debugging)). Right now I miss some of these and then only find out when
the tests that I did run go orange on try and/or inbound/autoland, and
then I have to locally change the relevant C++ so I can test in my opt
build (or resign myself to doing a separate clobber debug build somewhere).
~ Gijs
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