Is Java assert broken?

Question

While poking around the questions, I recently discovered the assert keyword in Java. At first, I was excited. Something useful I didn\'t already know! A more

Answer 1

Assertions aren't for the end user to see. They're for the programmer, so you can make sure the code is doing the right thing while it's being developed. Once the testing's done, assertions are usually turned off for performance reasons.

If you're anticipating that something bad is going to happen in production, like listOfStuff being null, then either your code isn't tested enough, or you're not sanitizing your input before you let your code have at it. Either way, an "if (bad stuff) { throw an exception }" would be better. Assertions are for test/development time, not for production.