[Python-Dev] what environment variable should contain compiler warning suppression flags?

[Stephen J. Turnbull]

Steve Holden writes:

 > I agree - trying to step through -O2 optimized code isn't going to
 > help debug your code, it's going to help you debug the
 > optimizer. That's a very rare use case.

Not really.  I don't have a lot of practice in debugging at that
level, so take it with a grain of salt, but what I've found with
XEmacs code is that debugging at -O0 is less often helpful than
debugging at -O2.  Quite often a naive compilation strategy is used
which basically turns those C statements into macros for the
underlying assembler, and the code works the way the author thinks it
should.  But his assumptions are invalid, and when optimized it fails.

So I guess you can call that "debugging the optimizer" if you like....