assert() safety in multithreaded context

Question

so I cannot seem to find solid info on whether assert is useable in a mulththreaded context.

logically to me it seems if an assertion fails the thread get shutdown but not the other threads?

or does the entire process get killed?

so basically my question. is it safe to use assert in a multithreaded environment without leaking resources?

Answer 1

if you see the man page of assert(), it clearly states,

The purpose of this macro is to help the programmer find bugs in his program. The message "assertion failed in file foo.c, function do_bar(), line 1287" is of no help at all to a user.

This means, it's only useful [and should be used] in a developing environment, not in production software. IMO, in development stage, you need not to worry about leaks caused by assert(). YMMV.

Once you finished debugging your code, you can simply switch off the assert() functionality by defining [#define] NDEBUG.

Answer 2

I'd say more than yes. If I'd see a multithreaded code without asserts I'd not trust it. If you simplify a bit its implementations to something like:

#define assert(x) if( !(x) ) abort()

You'll see that it does nothing special for thread-safety or thread-specific. It's your responsibility to provide race-free condition and if the assertion fails, the whole process is aborted.