Dynamically set Python interpreter optimization at runtime

Question

After a while of looking for the duplicates in here the only thing I find is no-ops and optimizing with Cython which is completely unrelated. What I'm trying to accomplish is to dynamically set python -O flag at runtime.

Basically, there is one value sys.flags.optimize which is read-only. I'm looking for an option to change it or to find a place which can have this value changed and affects the bytecode generating.

According to the doc the official way is to call it before the interpreter is spin up, so I wonder if it's even possible, however this is what I've found:

• Python/compiler.c -> c_optimize
• optimization_level setup in C from environment variable PYTHONOPTIMIZE
• Lib/py_compile.py

Which seems like py_compile is called "somewhere" (GitHub search shows only doc or tests, not the actual caller at runtime) and manages the optimization_level in the compiler.c from above. That would mean I can change it within Python and make compiled interpreter assemble me code with and without optimizations in the same session/process.

I can't seem to find the CLI params parsing though, nor any related "state" that can be changed at runtime.

My target (for now) is to optionally allow/remove assert keyword which can be done by -O alone (via compiler_assert() that needs the level set, however I'm struggling with finding the "missing link" between C code building AST and the actual Python code which seems to be holding the config state (because py_compile contains raw optimize values) and seems to be compiling and loading the bytecode for the interpreter itself.

Is there any way to change the optimization_level so that I can achieve this behavior and pretty much do this in a single Python session?

>>> # change optimize to 1
>>> def test(): assert True
>>> import dis
>>> dis.dis(test)
  1           0 LOAD_CONST               0 (None)
              2 RETURN_VALUE
>>> # change optimize to 0
>>> dis.dis(test)
  1           0 LOAD_CONST               1 (True)
              2 POP_JUMP_IF_TRUE         8
              4 LOAD_GLOBAL              0 (AssertionError)
              6 RAISE_VARARGS            1
        >>    8 LOAD_CONST               0 (None)
             10 RETURN_VALUE