src/ carries 1086 std.debug.assert calls. They are how a detected inconsistency becomes a crash instead of a durable write -- TigerStyle's 'downgrade catastrophic correctness bugs into liveness bugs' -- and that trade exists only while the assertion does. ReleaseFast and ReleaseSmall compile every one to nothing, so a binary built that way converts each guarded corruption into an unguarded one, in a store where a bad frame is permanent and a crash is not.

Measured, not assumed. Read-side verbs are indistinguishable between the two modes: status, log and stat all sit inside noise on a 5 MB store. zit pack is not: 599ms fast against 15.2s safe, about 25x, because the delta encoder's best-of-N search is a tight per-byte loop where a bounds check is a large share of the work. That argues for setRuntimeSafety(false) on that measured loop -- local, reviewable, over code the fuzz and DST lanes already cover -- rather than stripping assertions from every other path in the binary. Not taken here.

Note the option surface changes: stating a preference replaces the -Doptimize enum with a -Drelease bool, so the deliberate escape hatch is the top-level --release=fast. -Doptimize=ReleaseFast no longer parses.

ci_test pins the preference, and says that if the project ever decides to ship unchecked, the pin should be deleted in that same commit so the decision is visible in history rather than arriving as drift. check-in: 4379187a10 user: dmestas tags: trunk