Re: AssertLog instead of Assert in some places

Hi,

On 2023-08-11 11:14:34 -0700, Peter Geoghegan wrote:
> On Fri, Aug 11, 2023 at 10:57 AM Andres Freund <andres(at)anarazel(dot)de> wrote:
> > I am quite strongly against this. This will lead to assertions being hit in
> > tests without that being noticed, e.g. because they happen in a background
> > process that just restarts.
>
> Couldn't you say the same thing about defensive "can't happen" ERRORs?
> They are essentially a form of assertion that isn't limited to
> assert-enabled builds.

Yes. A lot of them I hate them with the passion of a thousand suns ;). "Oh,
our transaction state machinery is confused. Yes, let's just continue going
through the same machinery again, that'll resolve it.". Even worse are the
ones that are just WARNINGS. Like "Oh, something wrote beyond the length of
allocated memory, that's something to issue a WARNING about and happily
continue".

There've been people arguing in the past that it's good for robustness to do
stuff like that. I think it's exactly the opposite.

Now, don't get me wrong, there are plenty cases where a "this shouldn't
happen" elog(ERROR) is appropriate...

> I have sometimes thought that it would be handy if there was a variant
> of "can't happen" ERRORs that took on the structure of an assertion.

What are you imagining? Basically something that generates an elog(ERROR) with
the stringified expression as part of the error message?

Greetings,

Andres Freund