[TUHS] To NDEBUG or not to NDEBUG, that is the question

[Aharon Robbins via TUHS]

Hello All.

A bit off-topic, perhaps, but thoughts from this crowd would be welcome.

I just finished tracking down a bug in gawk that was only noticed
because the Windows port is built without -DNEBUG, causing assertions
(via assert(3)) to be included in the code.  The regular *nix build
defines NDEBUG, so that assertions are not included in the regular,
"production" build.

Now, I can understand why assert() and NDEBUG work the way they do.
Particularly on the small PDP-11s on which C and Unix were developed,
it made sense to have a way to remove assertions from code that would
be installed for all users.

However, I'm starting to wonder.  Are my habits from yesteryear (defining
NDEBUG by default) getting in the way of my being able (or users being
able) to find bugs and report them?  Should I remove the defining of
NDEBUG from the default build?  In particular, given the many orders of
magnitude increase in CPU and memory of modern systems, is it likely
that assertions won't really affect performance all that much?

I'm starting to think that the answer is yes, it's time to remove
NDEBUG.  But I'm curious what the experienced developers here
might think.

Much thanks,

Arnold