When running into an assert failure, the boost unit test framework does not shut down cleanly. It does not call the BasicTestingSetup destructor. Thus, the test process will never shut down. As a result of that, the failure is never passed back to the caller.

On travis, this will result in frustrating and hard-to-debug timeouts: E.g. https://travis-ci.org/bitcoin/bitcoin/jobs/575909995#L3584

I see two ways to fix this:

• Use exceptions instead of assertions, especially in non-validation debug code
• Teach the boost unit test framework how to handle asserts