We change slightly on development checks are enabled.

[lemire]

Currently, we enable the expensive development checks unless NDEBUG is set. Though it is true that CMake will often set NDEBUG, it is not set by default by C++ compilers. This means that some folks are getting development checks even in their release builds. This was never reported to us, but it might happen.

We still rely on NDEBUG, but for our asserts... So the users should still want to set NDEBUG, but it is a different purpose. (The development checks are much more than mere asserts, they allocate buffers and so forth.)

[jkeiser]

No issues here if that's actually happening--I'd be mortified if release builds had it on! The main purpose was to ensure dev checks were on by default in debug builds so that during debugging and testing you would get better information.

[lemire]

@jkeiser The thing is, if you do c++ -O3 mycode.cpp, it does not set NDEBUG. I think CMake sets NDEBUG, but you cannot be certain that this will hold generally.

We do have asserts that depend on NDEBUG, and enabling them is not free, but it is not comparable to the 'development checks'.