Why enabling Release build for CI?

[avitase]

What is the reason to enable Release build, including -DNDEBUG, during CI? Wouldn't it make more sense to keep assertions active during testing to catch potential wrong assumptions? I tend to place a lot of asserts in my code and only remove them during deployment...

[friendlyanon]

The idea was that developers locally will do things in Debug, then CI will take care of Release and Sanitize configurations. Developers still have the opportunity to create a local build of those variants if anything comes up in CI.

Some hardening options also only work with release builds (e.g. _FORTIFY_SOURCE) so I left CI with those build configurations.

The language provided assert is pretty poorly equipped as a general purpose assertion, so that's why I don't really care much about it.