Should one leave asserts in production iOS apps?

Question

Common practice might be to put asserts in code to check input parameters, data integrity, and such, during app development.

I test my apps, BUT, given that I\'m not K

Answer 1

Leave them in for exactly the reasons you specify, but also because in certain cases they act as comments (especially where types are concerned in Objective-C). And do not worry about the performance hit unless it becomes a problem or you know you're in a performance critical situation and a particular assert is going to be run hundreds or thousands of times on the main run-loop.

Can't resist mentioning this article on asserts vs. NSAssert.

Personally, I start to remove the ones that I've put in for debugging purposes, but if you use asserts to check data integrity, parameters, resource dependencies and other related things -- arguably, you could throw Exceptions yourself instead, which might be wiser -- then I would leave them in.

Note: A further point is that just removing asserts is utterly stupid, since your app will either crash or be in an inconsistent state, both of which are worse than crashing in a way that you can recognize from the crash logs (so leave the asserts in). Replace asserts with if statements, on the other hand, could be a good thing.