Hi,
Sometimes I find adding assert() calls in my code very handy for various reasons: - failures in development mode on some complex code where exposing all the details to unit tests is sometimes hard and/or pointless - readability of the code
But I worry about the perf implications of these lines of code. I don't want these assertions to be used to track errors in production mode.
PHP7 introduced expectations which permit to have zero-cost assert() [1] Looking at the MW codebase we don't seem to use assert frequently (only 26 files [2] ).
Are there some discussions about this? Is assert() a good practice for the MW code base? If yes would it make sense to benefit from zero-cost assertions in WMF appservers?
Thanks!
[1] http://php.net/manual/en/function.assert.php#function.assert.expectations [2] https://codesearch.wmflabs.org/search/?q=%5Ctassert%5C(&i=nope&files...