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Assertions are compiled out of 'production' (non-debug) builds.

The same holds true of Python if you run it with the optimize flag/environment variable, leading to any number of hilarious bugs because people cause side-effects in their assert calls.

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Compiling out assertions in production is like taking your seat belt off when you leave the driveway. Seriously, in my experience, all the interesting stuff happens in production. We deploy two builds, app.debug and app.release. We run generally run app.debug unless there are performance issues, but even in that case, we sometimes run it just to make sure nothing shows up.

Same here. And it's insignificant cost to have a terminal attached to the process. So instead a mere stack trace and local vars on the stack in the core dump, I actually have the entire process, the heap with all the objects, all file descriptorsabd various OS handles and state, to interrogate. The program would have been running many hours, sometimes days, up to this point. Why would anyone throw all that valuable info away by default.

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