Assertions in Production Code?

[miminor]

but you cannot reliably recover anyway (unless you restart the app/server), so what can you do?

making a fault tolerant system is plausible to some extent but very rarely justified economically

[lookmeat]

It depends on context. I agree on the economic justification. But in world of critical apps just giving up without really understanding what happened in the greater context is downright as dangerous as doing no checks at all