assertion support

Sat Aug 3 15:07:00 GMT 2002

Hi,
I have some questions about the plans for assertion support in gij/gcj.
I see Bug 6996 (gij needs assertion-related command-line options). I
have a patch that adds command line options for controlling assertion
status to gij. This is done similiarly to how the properties specified
on the command line are handled, and VMClassLoader.<clinit> takes
care of setting up the defaults.
Is this what the bug had in mind, or something more sophisticated such
as optimizing the byte code at load time if $assertionsDisabled is true?
Also, what about support in gcj? Would it make sense to be able to set
defaults at compile time, which could be changed at runtime by
a GCJ_ASSERTION_STATUS environment variable? 