[Mtinie]

That was the first thing that came to mind, too. It isn't unusual to program in a shortcut like that for the QA team. It just looks like it was missed when they rolled that code out.

It just goes to show (if my assumption is correct) that it's worth NOT adding in those efficiencies, when possible, because of situations just like this one.

[lostcolony]

No, that's why you tie that kind of code to a compiler flag.

[zheshishei]

I feel kind of dumb for asking this, but how do you do that?

[lostcolony]

Depends on the language/compiler/linker/preprocessor/interpreter/etc.

I'm not really a C developer, but since it's a lingua franca, GCC lets you pass in -D (name), which will define that passed in as a macro, letting you do stuff like

  #ifdef DEBUG
  //Do debug stuff
  #endif

so that if you run gcc with -DDEBUG, you will have DEBUG defined and set to 1 (you can also do DEBUG=val and similar I believe), and if you don't, it will be removed.

Java, I don't believe javac has a similar compiler mechanism; you either need a hardcoded global value in the source code

  public static final boolean DEBUG = true;

and you can do similar

  if DEBUG { (...) }

and then for your prod compile you set DEBUG to false and recompile everything; or, you can swap out implementations of a particular class, and have everything code to the interface (all that typical Java IoC dependency injection joy).

For any other language, consult your documentation. If there's nothing else, and the language allows you to pass in arguments into the runtime executable, you could always do something really ungainly like accept an argument for 'environment', and have code that executes differently based on that. It's a minimal cost (since any given run will lead to that particular switch always executing the same way, I'd wager your CPUs branch prediction is going to effectively make it free, but even if it doesn't, it's minimal impact), and it lets you execute the code differently based on what environment you specify you're in.

[pflats]

In C and C-derived languages, the C preprocessor can do some work on its own before anything ever hits the compiler. You can put a block of code like:

    #ifdef DEBUG
    if (pw == "backdoor")
      return true;
    #endif

And then when you want to have your backdoor active, just #define DEBUG somewhere upstream. That way, the backdoor code will never even be compiled in a non-debug program.

[Gracana]

It can be as simple as:

    #ifdef DEBUG
    ... code ...
    #endif