Vyper is the Pythonic Programming Language for the Ethereum Virtual Machine. In versions up to and including 0.4.2rc1, concat() may skip evaluation of side effects when the length of an argument is zero. This is due to a fastpath in the implementation which skips evaluation of argument expressions when their length is zero. In practice, it would be very unusual in user code to construct zero-length bytestrings using an expression with side-effects, since zero-length bytestrings are typically constructed with the empty literal b"".

the only way to construct an empty bytestring which has side effects would be with the ternary operator introduced in v0.3.8, e.g. b"" if self.do_some_side_effect() else b"". The fix is available in pull request 4644 and expected to be part of the 0.4.2 release. As a workaround, don't have side effects in expressions which construct zero-length bytestrings.