[Python-ideas] Disabling optimizations

[Antoine Pitrou]

On Fri, 23 May 2014 07:28:32 +0200
Stefan Behnel <stefan_ml at behnel.de> wrote:
> > 
> > As I already proposed, we could get rid of .pyo files all together and only
> > write unoptimised .pyc files, and then apply the optimisations at load time
> > based on the current interpreter config. I think that would give us a good
> > tradeoff between fast (precompiled) code loading and differing requirements
> > on byte code optimisations.
> 
> Stefan Krah already proposed -Os (optimise for space) for the cases where
> you want to reduce the size of the byte code file, e.g. by removing doc
> strings. That could become the next .pyo file. Although it's unclear to me
> why you would do that, instead of just compressing them.

People who are really short on disk space (embedded devs?) probably do
both: first strip docstrings and friends, then compress.

For the same reason, optimizing in-memory would be detrimental:
optimizations can usually reduce the size of pyc files.

(besides, optimizing at compile-time allows us to do more costly
optimizations without caring *too much* about their overhead)

Regards

Antoine.