Study: Python Optimization Flags (`-O` / `-OO`)

What the flags do

Flag	Effect
`-O`	Removes `assert` statements; sets `__debug__ = False`
`-OO`	All of `-O`, plus strips docstrings from compiled bytecode (`.pyc`)

For ML-style workloads:

Code with large docstrings should show little-to-no runtime difference (docstrings are not evaluated at call time), but .pyc files will be smaller.
Pure compute (e.g., numpy matrix ops, PyTorch CNN forward/backward) should be unaffected, since the bottleneck is in native C++/CUDA, not Python bytecode.

File	Description
`workloads/docstring_heavy.py`	Repeated instantiation of heavily-documented layer classes
`workloads/matrix_compute.py`	Numpy matmul loop (control — should be flat across all flags)
`workloads/ppo_atari.py`	CleanRL PPO update kernel on synthetic Atari observations (torch, CPU)

uv sync
uv run python benchmark.py

To be added