Re: RFC: expectations/assertions

On Tue, Feb 4, 2014 at 1:58 AM, Stas Malyshev <smalyshev@sugarcrm.com>wrote: > Hi! > > > In main opinion, the main advantage of the proposal is ability to use of > > assert() function in production code with zero cost. > > It might be important, because cost of the assert() call and condition > > evaluation might be expensive. > > I agree, this would be nice. Though it can be implemented using closures > and calling function only when needed. Granted, it is less convenient > and I'd like to have generic conditional compilation facility that could > help with it (or compiler/optimizer smart enough that if(<constant > false>) could be eliminated by it) Unfortunately, optimizer is not smart enough to solve this problem (on purpose). It may substitute only internal constants and constants defined in the same file > but doing it as one-off hack for one > specific function doesn't look like ideal solution to me. > I wouldn't say it's an ideal solution. It's more a compromise that allows safer checks in debugging and running in production without performance lose. The solution also keeps full BC with old assert() behavior, that wasn't trivial :) > > BTW, current patch has zend.assertions as INI_SYSTEM, which means the > whole server can either have assertions on or off. It's INI_SYSTEM on purpose. zend.assertions is a 3 way switch that may disable code generation for assert(). Changing it after PHP files are already cached won't make any effect. > Which means if you > want to have two sites with different settings (like staging and > production, or production and debug copy), you'd have to set up separate > PHP server for each. > yes. > > > > It's similar to C which provides assert() function, but near every > > project defines ASSERT macro anyway, to eliminate assert() calls for > > release build. > > In C, you can do it with NDEBUG setting, which works a bit differently - > you compile it once, and then it's predictable forever. With PHP it's > not that easy, unfortunately. > So, C provides special handling for assert() as well :) Thanks. Dmitry. > > -- > Stanislav Malyshev, Software Architect > SugarCRM: http://www.sugarcrm.com/ > (408)454-6900 ext. 227 >