Per http://boost.org/boost-build2/doc/html/bbv2/reference/tools.html#bbv2.refere..., it should have no effect indeed.
Ok, my mistake.
Furthermore, program options library is alignment-sensitive.
Sorry, what is that, why is that a bad thing, and what are you proposing to do about it?
I talk about struct member alignment aka packing. As I see, boost\config\abi\msvc_prefix.hpp and msvc_suffix.hpp were designed especially to prevent situation when program crashes if different alignment was used while building library and application. If I build my program with -Zp4 (structure members aligned to 4 bytes) and boost::program_options without -Zp option (default alignment for MSVC is 8), my program will crashes. But there are no such effect with, for example, serialization or filesystem library. I think that