The goal of something like pledge/unveil is to harden a carefully written program from being exploited, so it has a role to play at runtime. Asserts are used f

The goal of something like pledge/unveil is to harden a carefully written program from being exploited, so it has a role to play at runtime. Asserts are used for program invariants, so checking them at runtime is less important. So the big problem with ifdefing them out is that you no longer get these guarantees. Linux has seccomp that is similar in functionality, so the guarantees can be ported over - it's just going to take effort.