Is assert evil? [closed]

Answer 1

No, there's nothing wrong with assert as long as you use it as intended.

That is, it's supposed to be for catching cases that "can't happen", during debugging, as opposed to normal error handling.

• Assert: A failure in the program's logic itself.
• Error Handling: An erroneous input or system state not due to a bug in the program.

Answer 2

I like to use assert a lot. I find it very useful when I am building applications for the first time (perhaps for a new domain). Instead of doing very fancy error checking (that I would consider premature optimization) I code fast and I add a lot of asserts. After I know more about how things work I do a rewrite and remove some of the asserts and change them for better error handling.

Because of asserts I spend a lot of less time coding/debugging programs.

I've also noticed that the asserts help me think of many things that could break my programs.

Answer 3

i never use assert(), examples usually show something like this:

int* ptr = new int[10];
assert(ptr);

This is bad, i never do this, what if my game is allocating a bunch of monsters? why should i crash the game, instead you should handle the errors gracefully, so do something like:

CMonster* ptrMonsters = new CMonster[10];
if(ptrMonsters == NULL) // or u could just write if(!ptrMonsters)
{
    // we failed allocating monsters. log the error e.g. "Failed spawning 10 monsters".
}
else
{
    // initialize monsters.
}