Spell.cpp ASSERT

[The_Game_Master]

Hello,

i recently got a crash on Spell.cpp line "ASSERT( Caster != NULL && info != NULL );" on linux.

I was wondering why do we use these 2 ASSERTS here

    ASSERT( Caster != NULL && info != NULL );
   ASSERT( info == sSpellStore.LookupEntry( info->Id ) && "`info` must be pointer to sSpellStore element");

As far as i know in the release method the ASSERT command, or more commonly used as small letters assert is skipped.

Why do we need them, and why can't we just use small caps "assert" there?

Or just better remove them all.

I used

LDFLAGS=-L/usr/local/lib
LD_LIBRARY_PATH=/usr/local/lib
CXXFLAGS=-I/usr/local/include

autoreconf -ifv
autoconf

CFLAGS="-fno-strict-aliasing -O2" \\
CFLAGS="-fno-delete-null-pointer-checks -O2" \\
CXXFLAGS="-fno-strict-aliasing -O2" \\
../configure \\

to compile, so i'm guessing that the compiler didn't ignore all the aserts, or that line is used for something else inside the code and thats just stupid. What's the difference between "assert" and "ASSERT"?

[Lynx3d]

ASSERT is a macro that does a bit more before calling the standard C asssert().

And did you really ask why asserts are needed??

For exactly those situations like you experienced: Finding the cause of fatal errors and stop the program, rather than letting it happily crash later at a random position where you can only guess why it crashed, and hope it didn't cause too much fatal data corruption on its way...

Btw, assertions are not just magically "skipped in release mode" since there is no universal definition of that, C assert is defined to do nothing when NDEBUG is defined.

But seriously, i doubt you really want to disable them especially when they stop your program...