[Python-Dev] (#19562) Asserts in Python stdlib code (datetime.py) (original) (raw)

Maciej Fijalkowski fijall at gmail.com
Sun Nov 17 22:05:07 CET 2013

On Sun, Nov 17, 2013 at 9:02 PM, Barry Warsaw <barry at python.org> wrote:

On Nov 17, 2013, at 05:14 PM, Victor Stinner wrote:

2013/11/16 Maciej Fijalkowski <fijall at gmail.com>: Can I see some writeup how -OO benefit embedded devices?

You get smaller .pyc files. In an embedded device, the whole OS may be written in a small memory, something like 64 MB or smaller. Removing doctrings help to fit in 64 MB. I'm in support of separate flags for stripping docstrings and asserts. I'd even be fine with eliminating a flag to strip docstrings if we had a post-processing tool that you could apply to pyc files to strip out the docstrings. Another problem that I had while addressing these options in Debian was the use of .pyo for both -O and -OO level. -Barry

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My problem with -O and -OO is that their arguments are very circular. Indeed, I understand the need why you would want in certain and limited cases to remove both docstrings and asserts. So some options for doing so are ok. But a lot of arguments I see are along the lines of "don't use asserts because -O removes them". If the option was named --remove-asserts, noone would care, but people care since -O is documented as "do optimizations" and people assume this is what it does (makes code faster) and as unintended consequence removes asserts.

Cheers, fijal

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