> You are saying this would not have happened in a C release build where asserts define to nothing?

Afaik, Go and Java are the only languages that make you pause and explicitly deal with these exceptions.

I am one of those old grey beards (or at least, I got started shipping C code in the 1990s), and I'd leave asserts in prod serverside code given the choice; better that than a totally unpredictable error path.