If I have time, I'll benchmark it later.

I was already benchmarking for the other responses, so I did it for you.

Here is the code

#!/usr/bin/perl

use strict;
use warnings;

use Benchmark qw(:all);
use Carp::Assert;

sub CarpAssert {
    my ($test) = @_;
    assert($test < 50) if DEBUG;
    return $test;
}

sub OrAssert {
    my ($test) = @_;
    ($test < 50) || die "Test is wrong";
    return $test;
}

my @nums = map { ((rand() * 100) % 50) } (0 .. 100);

cmpthese(10_000, {    
    'CarpAssert' => sub { eval { CarpAssert($_) } for (@nums) },    
    'OrAssert'   => sub { eval { OrAssert($_)   } for (@nums) },   
});
[download]

Here is the results of this:

Benchmark: timing 10000 iterations of CarpAssert, OrAssert...
CarpAssert: 11 wallclock secs ( 9.92 usr +  0.04 sys =  9.96 CPU) @ 10
+04.02/s (n=10000)
  OrAssert:  8 wallclock secs ( 7.14 usr +  0.03 sys =  7.17 CPU) @ 13
+94.70/s (n=10000)
             Rate CarpAssert   OrAssert
CarpAssert 1004/s         --       -28%
OrAssert   1395/s        39%         --
[download]

I then tried turning off Carp::Assert, and it was only 3% faster than the OR assertions.

Benchmark: timing 10000 iterations of CarpAssert, OrAssert...
CarpAssert:  9 wallclock secs ( 6.50 usr +  0.03 sys =  6.53 CPU) @ 15
+31.39/s (n=10000)
  OrAssert: 10 wallclock secs ( 6.72 usr +  0.02 sys =  6.74 CPU) @ 14
+83.68/s (n=10000)
             Rate   OrAssert CarpAssert
OrAssert   1484/s         --        -3%
CarpAssert 1531/s         3%         --
[download]

I then changed the OR assertion to use a no-op error handler (as if they were off). Here is the modified sub

sub noOpError {}
sub OrAssert {
    my ($test) = @_;
    ($test < 50) || noOpError("Test is wrong");
    return $test;
}
[download]

And surprisingly it slowed OR down

Benchmark: timing 10000 iterations of CarpAssert, OrAssert...
CarpAssert:  6 wallclock secs ( 6.54 usr +  0.00 sys =  6.54 CPU) @ 15
+29.05/s (n=10000)
  OrAssert:  7 wallclock secs ( 7.11 usr +  0.02 sys =  7.13 CPU) @ 14
+02.52/s (n=10000)
             Rate   OrAssert CarpAssert
OrAssert   1403/s         --        -8%
CarpAssert 1529/s         9%         --
[download]

An idea you might like to steal from it is to append if DEBUG to your assertions, where DEBUG is a constant that you can set to 1 in development/testing and to 0 in production. That way, you have all of the benefits of assertions in development, and none of the overhead in production (along with none of the benefits.)

Personally I do not like to turn off my assertions, I also see my debug statements as different from assertions. Besides IMO, having the if DEBUG at the end of the statement would really ruin the readability of it all.

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