> bugs that have been very difficult to find, as they were 'fixed' by side effects of assert statements and hence didn't show up in debug builds. In those case

> bugs that have been very difficult to find, as they were 'fixed' by side effects of assert statements and hence didn't show up in debug builds. In those cases, the assert() was used incorrectly. However, that's not a reason to include the assert code in release builds. In a similar way, source code will often have troubleshooting code such as: #if _DEBUG // or #ifndef NDEBUG std::cerr << "inspect size: " << invoices.size() << std::endl; // more debugging-related code ... #endif Just because some programmers mistakenly put unintended side-effects in between the #if_DEBUG/#endif doesn't mean we want that code in the release builds. The purpose of assert() and _DEBUG is to not include them in release builds.