does it have any sense for a linux distribution (arch to be specific) to provide default Python package compiled with valgrind support? I thought this flag was just about silencing false positives generated by valgrind (in other words a workaround for "bugs" of another software) and useful only when developing Python itself or C extensions.

The same distribution also compiles by default to a shared library and this has a quite noticeable impact on performance on x64 (surprisingly for me) for CPU bound processing; in a few test cases I measured valgrind+shared Python running at 66% the speed of plain ./configure && make Python on my system. Is this setting reasonable for general users?

If they are good defaults, why aren't them the default?

Andrea Griffini