fix: alt syntax for positive but faster assertions

[erights]

Like Agoric/agoric-sdk#6174

Replace some occurrences of

assert(..condExpr.., X`..detailsString..`);

with

..condExpr.. || assert.fail(X`..detailsString..`);

I only made the changes that I was easily able to do via regexp search and replace in vscode

^\s*assert\(\n\s*(.*?),\n\s*X`(.*?)`,\n\s*\);
($1) || assert.fail(X`$2`);

and similar, followed by a global yarn lint-fix and then repair until everything tested green again. No doubt there are more cases that I missed. But from @dtribble 's measurements, these are already enough to show significant perf improvements.

[erights]

Ready for review!

@arirubinstein for some reason, I cannot add you as an official reviewer. Please consider yourself a reviewer anyway. Thanks.

[kriskowal]

If this is intended to be comprehensive, this does not appear to include compartment-mapper, which does rely on assertions extensively for type narrowing.

[erights]

If this is intended to be comprehensive, this does not appear to include compartment-mapper, which does rely on assertions extensively for type narrowing.

It is intended to be comprehensive. Everything that should have been covered that I instead skipped, I skipped only because

• it wasn't caught by the regexp search-and-replaces that I tries, or
• the auto-replacement had some other problem, as regexp-based transforms often do, so I backed those out.

In any case, after this PR we should indeed hunt down and convert the others. Fortunately, there's no coupling so we can do these in separate PRs.