On Sat, May 8, 2021 at 5:08 PM Pablo Galindo Salgado <pablogsal@gmail.com> wrote:

> Why not put in it -O instead?  Then -O means lose asserts and lose fine-grained tracebacks, while -OO continues to also

strip out doc strings.

What if someone wants to keep asserts but do not want the extra data?

What if I want to keep asserts and docstrings but don't want the extra data?

Or actually, consider this. I *need* to keep asserts (because rightly or wrongly, I have a dependency, or my own code, that relies on them), but I *don't* want docstrings (because they're huge and I don't want the overhead in production), and I *don't* want the extra data in production either.

Now what?

I think what this illustrates is that the entire concept of optimizations in Python needs a complete rethink. It's already fundamentally broken for someone who wants to keep asserts but remove docstrings. Adding a third layer to this is a perfect opportunity to reconsider the whole paradigm.

I'm getting off-topic here, and this should probably be a thread of its own, but perhaps what we should introduce is a compiler directive, similar to future statements but not that, that one can place at the top of a source file to tell the compiler "this file depends on asserts, don't optimize them out". Same for each thing that can be optimized that has a runtime behavior effect, including docstrings.