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I don't think that counts as either "ghetto source control" or "abuse" and I'd be interested to find out why you feel this way.

I mean, if you're talking about basic C, this (_DEBUG) is actually built-in to most systems from the get-go, for exactly this purpose. "Abuse?"

The standard is `NDEBUG`, which (amongst other things) turns off asserts

I think the parent had in mind introducing and maintaining some feature(s) blocked out in ifdefs for a time, which is sort of ghetto branching.