(Just picking out a random item from the list at [1] and showing the current progress and giving a good point on where to start. Maybe we can do this with the entire list?)

> The assert statement is "dumb" in a way that it doesn't show me what data it actually compared, making using pure-assert in unittests a very cumbersome task. Pretty much every slightly bigger project I have see wraps assert in some other function to display useful information about the specific check. I would consider a useful-by-default assert statement to be very valuable, especially because it could show much more and nicer information and we could all drop our workarounds.

There has been a lot of work on this, e.g.

https://issues.dlang.org/show_bug.cgi?id=5547
http://wiki.dlang.org/DIP83
https://github.com/dlang/dmd/pull/5189

and for the record a DMD PR (https://github.com/dlang/dmd/pull/263) was rejected, because:

> this is more properly the domain of a library template

However, the library PR got rejected, because it it should better be done in the compiler:

https://github.com/dlang/phobos/pull/4323

I think the best solution is to push DIP83 to the new DIP process and thus convince Walter that useful asserts should be part of the compiler.

[1] http://forum.dlang.org/post/o3cdl9$ecs$1@digitalmars.com