r-lib
WISH: Near-zero overhead assertions
(continuation of my Tweet https://twitter.com/henrikbengtsson/status/984323561656483841)
Analogously to how you can produce debug messages using:
"!DEBUG Hello world: x = `x`"
I'd like to run assertion statements that have near-zero overhead, e.g.
"!ASSERT 'x' is integer `stopifnot(is.integer(x))`"
This will allow package developers to add lots of internal assertions validating not only the contract of returned values, but also intermediate values.
The above could be achieved by
"!DEBUG `stopifnot(is.integer(x))`"
but the downside is that this will also trigger lots of DEBUG-produced output if such exists. Not only may such output clutter troubleshooting but it may also have side effects conflicting with any troubleshooting efforts, e.g. in a DEBUG statement may touch a promise (think "delayed assignment") causing different results than when disabled.
Any assert framework should be supported, so it should not be hard coded to stopifnot() [which comes with even more overhead in R (>= 3.5.0)], assertthat, checkmate, ...
stopifnot() [which comes with even more overhead in R (>= 3.5.0)]
Can you point me to a benchmark or commit?
