Re: Issue 1908 in lilypond: Causes lily to fail during regtests if binary is unoptimized

[lilypond]

Comment #3 on issue 1908 by address@hidden: Causes lily to fail during  
regtests if binary is unoptimized
http://code.google.com/p/lilypond/issues/detail?id=1908

Compiling with -DNDEBUG makes only sense for compiling binaries shipped to  
end customers that never get to see stderr anyway and that are absolutely  
space and performance critical.

assert(...) indicates a condition that should never be possible to occur  
and that the code is not designed to handle.

It is WRONG, WRONG, WRONG to compiled with -DNDEBUG except for extreme  
deployment conditions where graceful failure is not an option preferable to  
crashing failure or undefined behavior.

If assertions make GUB fail, they need to be fixed (meaning their cause  
determined and eliminated), not disabled.

In particular, assertions must still hold when we are optimizing, so it  
does not make sense to stop checking them.