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0563-remove-ndebug.md

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Summary

Remove official support for the ndebug config variable, replace the current usage of it with a more appropriate debug_assertions compiler-provided config variable.

Motivation

The usage of 'ndebug' to indicate a release build is a strange holdover from C/C++. It is not used much and is easy to forget about. Since it used like any other value passed to the cfg flag, it does not interact with other flags such as -g or -O.

The only current users of ndebug are the implementations of the debug_assert! macro. At the time of this writing integer overflow checking is will also be controlled by this variable. Since the optimisation setting does not influence ndebug, this means that code that the user expects to be optimised will still contain the overflow checking logic. Similarly, debug_assert! invocations are not removed, contrary to what intuition should expect. Enabling optimisations should been seen as a request to make the user's code faster, removing debug_assert! and other checks seems like a natural consequence.

Detailed design

The debug_assertions configuration variable, the replacement for the ndebug variable, will be compiler provided based on the value of the opt-level codegen flag, including the implied value from -O. Any value higher than 0 will disable the variable.

Another codegen flag debug-assertions will override this, forcing it on or off based on the value passed to it.

Drawbacks

Technically backwards incompatible change. However the only usage of the ndebug variable in the rust tree is in the implementation of debug_assert!, so it's unlikely that any external code is using it.

Alternatives

No real alternatives beyond different names and defaults.

Unresolved questions

From the RFC discussion there remain some unresolved details:

  • brson writes, "I have a minor concern that -C debug-assertions might not be the right place for this command line flag - it doesn't really affect code generation, at least in the current codebase (also --cfg debug_assertions has the same effect).".
  • huonw writes, "It seems like the flag could be more than just a boolean, but rather take a list of what to enable to allow fine-grained control, e.g. none, overflow-checks, debug_cfg,overflow-checks, all. (Where -C debug-assertions=debug_cfg acts like --cfg debug.)".
  • huonw writes, "if we want this to apply to more than just debug_assert do we want to use a name other than -C debug-assertions?".