the old debug_assert always ran and tested the expression, which slows
down release builds. wrapping them in #ifndef NDEBUG is clumsy. the new
ASSERT behaves like assert and ENSURE like the old debug_assert. Let's
change any time-critical but not-super-important ENSURE to ASSERT to
speed up release builds. (already done in bits.h and unique_range.h)
This was SVN commit r9362.
Allow aggressive inlining of MD5 buffer updates (particularly for
fixed-size updates).
Make UTF-8 conversion a little faster.
This was SVN commit r7581.
