[munch117]

I understand and respect your position.

Nonetheless, I use asserts that are deactivated in release builds. The reason I do that is not because I need the speed. It's because it frees me from having to think about speed at all, when writing assertions. And that makes me write more assertions.

You could ask me, if I were to enable assertions in release builds today, what would the slowdown be? Would I even notice? And my answer would be, I don't know and I don't care. What I do know is that if assertions had been enabled in release builds from the start, then I would have written fewer of them.