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

[Steven D'Aprano]

On Sun, Nov 17, 2013 at 11:35:21AM +0100, Antoine Pitrou wrote:

> You didn't answer my question: did you actually use -OO in production,
> or not? Saying that -OO could have helped you optimize something you
> didn't care about isn't a very strong argument for -OO :)

Ah, sorry, I misunderstood your question.

I didn't use -OO, since I had no reason to remove docstrings. But I did 
use -O to remove asserts. I was talking about assertions, not 
docstrings. Since I haven't had to write code for embedded devices with 
severely constrained memory, I've never cared about using -OO in 
production.


> What I would like to know is if people *knowingly* add costly asserts
> to performance-critical code, with the intent of disabling them at
> runtime using -OO.

Yes, I have knowingly added costly asserts to code with the intend of 
disabling them at runtime. Was it *performance-critical* code? I don't 
know, that was the point of my earlier rambling -- I could demonstrate a 
speedup of the individual functions in benchmarks, but nobody spent the 
effort to determine which functions were performance critical.



-- 
Steven