Is Java assert broken?
- by BlairHippo
While poking around the questions, I recently discovered the assert keyword in Java. At first, I was excited. Something useful I didn't already know! A more efficient way for me to check the validity of input parameters! Yay learning!
But then I took a closer look, and my enthusiasm was not so much "tempered" as "snuffed-out completely" by one simple fact: you can turn assertions off.*
This sounds like a nightmare. If I'm asserting that I don't want the code to keep going if the input listOfStuff is null, why on earth would I want that assertion ignored? It sounds like if I'm debugging a piece of production code and suspect that listOfStuff may have been erroneously passed a null but don't see any logfile evidence of that assertion being triggered, I can't trust that listOfStuff actually got sent a valid value; I also have to account for the possibility that assertions may have been turned off entirely.
And this assumes that I'm the one debugging the code. Somebody unfamiliar with assertions might see that and assume (quite reasonably) that if the assertion message doesn't appear in the log, listOfStuff couldn't be the problem. If your first encounter with assert was in the wild, would it even occur to you that it could be turned-off entirely? It's not like there's a command-line option that lets you disable try/catch blocks, after all.
All of which brings me to my question (and this is a question, not an excuse for a rant! I promise!):
What am I missing?
Is there some nuance that renders Java's implementation of assert far more useful than I'm giving it credit for? Is the ability to enable/disable it from the command line actually incredibly valuable in some contexts? Am I misconceptualizing it somehow when I envision using it in production code in lieu of statements like if (listOfStuff == null) barf();?
I just feel like there's something important here that I'm not getting.
*Okay, technically speaking, they're actually off by default; you have to go out of your way to turn them on. But still, you can knock them out entirely.
