Daniel Lemire’s recent post “runtime asserts are not free” looks at the run-time cost of assert statements in C and shows that a simple assert in a frequently executed loop can cause significant overhead. My own opinion on assertions has shifted over the years, from “I don’t see the point” to “use them sparingly” to “use them as much as possible”. That last shift is largely due to Rust having two kinds of “assert” statement – assert and debug_assert – which has allowed me to accurately express t...