I'm wondering if it inlines it (and thus eliminates it).

But this would come with a performance penalty: it makes the function you assert() in no longer a leaf function (it calls assert()) and AFAIK, Go only inlines leaf functions. (So, any function in which you call assert() is no longer eligible for inlining.)

chrchang523 is correct. In my test the caller function can still get inlined.

deathanatos: Go 1.12 can inline non-leaf functions, and I’d be surprised if it still fails to do the right thing here.