It doesn't make sense for e.g. docstring-stripping to necessarily imply assert-stripping. These are totally separate options, useful for separate reasons, but currently tied together in the `-O` option.

This is not just a theoretical problem; at work we must strip docstrings in production for memory reasons, but we would prefer not to strip asserts. In fact we currently lint against use of `assert` because it is stripped in production, and we replace it with our own assertion function, which is less efficient and also integrates poorly with mypy's type binder.

A better option would be to enable each of these separate optimizations with a separate command-line flag (probably a string tag passed to a single flag, e.g. `-o strip_docstrings`).

PYC filename generation will also need to include all individually-enabled optimization string tags as part of the filename.

For backwards-compatibility, the existing `-O` flags should still be supported with the same meaning they currently have; `-O` and the new granular `-o` should be additive.

(A version of this was previously proposed as a minor part of PEP 511.)

Please let me know if this proposal is of sufficient complexity that a PEP is needed instead of just an issue.

Reference to some discussions on this topic https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/python-ideas/4oRgwrV1tVA

PSF link for Diana Clark's thread on python-ideas about this: https://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-ideas/2017-September/047224.html (this is the same thread Brett linked, just to the PSF archives rather than Google Groups)

Isn't this a duplicate of the old issue2506?

I don't thnk they are quite the same. The other issue is about turning off the peepholer entirely while this one is about breaking up the optimizations that -O and -OO do so you can choose which ones you want (e.g. still drop docstrings but keep asserts).

I'm not sure that the bug tracker is the best place to propose such idea. Maybe start a new thread on python-ideas?