[Python-Dev] (#19562) Asserts in Python stdlib code (datetime.py) (original) (raw)

Gregory Salvan apieum at gmail.com
Sun Nov 17 14:08:57 CET 2013

I believe the point of removing assertions is also to avoid throwing unhandled developper errors to end-user and not only "performance". It's like "raise" without "try" block.

It's certainly because I consider "assert" as a developper util, providing a concrete documentation about methods signatures.

In this idea I've made a small bench to determine if it is interesting for an assertion lib to have null functions as default. https://github.com/apieum/BenchAssert

I don't make critical performance applications but still doubt of the real interest of having dead code to better document.

2013/11/17 Steven D'Aprano <steve at pearwood.info>

On Sun, Nov 17, 2013 at 11:35:21AM +0100, Antoine Pitrou wrote:

> You didn't answer my question: did you actually use -OO in production, > or not? Saying that -OO could have helped you optimize something you > didn't care about isn't a very strong argument for -OO :) Ah, sorry, I misunderstood your question. I didn't use -OO, since I had no reason to remove docstrings. But I did use -O to remove asserts. I was talking about assertions, not docstrings. Since I haven't had to write code for embedded devices with severely constrained memory, I've never cared about using -OO in production.

> What I would like to know is if people knowingly add costly asserts > to performance-critical code, with the intent of disabling them at > runtime using -OO. Yes, I have knowingly added costly asserts to code with the intend of disabling them at runtime. Was it performance-critical code? I don't know, that was the point of my earlier rambling -- I could demonstrate a speedup of the individual functions in benchmarks, but nobody spent the effort to determine which functions were performance critical.

-- Steven

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