[OneWingedShark]

> Specifically, do the language semantics allow a mode where these checks can be turned off? Leaving them on all the time can be a huge performance burden, both directly and in the barriers they add to optimization (while there are potential optimization benefits to exploiting the guarantees of contracts, I don’t think as a practical matter they balance out).

Yes, with Ada it is typically a pragma or compiler-flag to turn checks off; however, Ada has a long history of having mandatory-checks and strongly-encouraging compiler-implementers to optimize the checks away when it is known they cannot fail (which is a surprising chunk of the time if you're coming from a C-based language).