Re: JSON/YAML/TOML/etc. parsing performance

[Philipp Stephani <p.stephani2@gmail.com>]

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Paul Eggert <eggert@cs.ucla.edu> schrieb am Mo., 9. Okt. 2017 um 07:54 Uhr:

> Philipp Stephani wrote:
> > I don't understand why minimizing the number of checks and assertions
> > should be a worthwhile goal. At the very least, the assertions document
> the
> > assumptions that we make about the values, and as such they are valuable
> > even if they never trigger.
>
> One can take the process too far. To take a deliberately extreme example,
> 'eassert (INT_MIN < 0)' would clutter the code unnecessarily, and would be
> discarded by the compiler anyway. Although none of the assertions in
> question
> were *that* obvious, some did have that flavor (and indeed, were optimized
> away
> by GCC). The patch that I proposed eliminated those, while retaining the
> ones
> that conveyed useful and nonobvious information. Admittedly some of the
> removals
> were judgment calls; however, the point remains that easserts should not
> waste
> the reader's time unnecessarily.
>

I agree, but I think anything that's not obvious deserves to be documented
(preferably in the form of an assertion). Such documentation avoids the
need to search for other places in the codebase and figuring out which
invariants are guaranteed from the implementation. INT_MIN < 0 is already
guaranteed by the C standard (although even that is somewhat subtle, given
the possibility of different widths and representations of integers,
padding bits, etc.),

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