enable assertions in CI tests

[MartinNowak]

I guess we'll still need to fix a couple of things and might have to disable class invariants to reduce the overhead.

[dlang-bot]

Thanks for your pull request, @MartinNowak!

Bugzilla references

Your PR doesn't reference any Bugzilla issue.

If your PR contains non-trivial changes, please reference a Bugzilla issue or create a manual changelog.

Testing this PR locally

If you don't have a local development environment setup, you can use Digger to test this PR:

dub fetch digger
dub run digger -- build "master + dmd#7344"

[WalterBright]

As I recall, back when (Kenji?) tried it it substantially slowed down the compiler. I want to review the best way forward on this first. I think the non-release mode inserts too many checks.

[MartinNowak]

As I recall, back when (Kenji?) tried it it substantially slowed down the compiler. I want to review the best way forward on this first. I think the non-release mode inserts too many checks.

One way forward is -release=assert,invariant so that we can enable asserts but not invariants, for the time being we might be better off with the slow-down.

[mathias-lang-sociomantic]

so that we can enable asserts but not invariants

Shameless self-plug: https://github.com/dlang/DIPs/blob/master/DIPs/DIP1006.md

[wilzbach]

I like the idea of finally moving forward with DIP1006! BTW one minor thing: if we start to use a different compiler build (non-release) than the one we ship on the auto-tester, how do we make sure that the version we ship doesn't get accidentally broken?

[ibuclaw]

Guess you can close #6746 then.

[wilzbach]

for the time being we might be better off with the slow-down.

Yes, we could simply do this on a faster CI (e.g. SemaphoreCI is twice as fast as Travis - I checked this recently. Compare SemaphoreCi build, Travis build).

I guess we'll still need to fix a couple of things and might have to disable class invariants to reduce the overhead.

FYI: our CircleCi build already runs without ENABLE_RELEASE - though

• the flag default is BUILD=release, but [doesn't set ENABLE_RELEASE`]([Makefile] Actually use release flags on BUILD=release #7473)
• I would like to use ENABLE_DEBUG on CircleCi too

[ibuclaw]

Yes, we could simply do this on a faster CI (e.g. SemaphoreCI is twice as fast as Travis

I would say more. On a good day, gdc is built with testsuite and unittests ran in 14 minutes flat on semaphore.

Travis barely could do the same in 50 minutes.

[MartinNowak]

What I found implementing #7980, we could hack this already today.
-release -unittest disables all run-time checks but assertions. If we versioned out dmd's few unittests, we'd get what we want for CI.

[ibuclaw]

What I found implementing #7980, we could hack this already today.
-release -unittest disables all run-time checks but assertions.

Heh, wouldn't that be a bug? Or maybe not. It does seem surprising though.

[MoonlightSentinel]

FWIW CircleCI and Azure already run the test suite with debug builds. Is this still required?

[Geod24]

Don't think so. Also we should have it in the release, but that's another topic.