> That would mean that all invariants are either assumed true What, exactly, is the benefit of assuming the invariant holds without checking it, over checking

> That would mean that all invariants are either assumed true What, exactly, is the benefit of assuming the invariant holds without checking it, over checking and aborting if it's not true? In the first case, you're likely to segfault anyway, just at some later point, making it harder to locate the point at which invariant was actually broken - and that's the best case. Worst case, you'll silently compute and return the wrong result based on garbage data.