> With the print statements - it does not crash:

I think this isn't directly relevant with prints but about re-compiling? (just guessing). Because I experienced when I compile python for the first time on a clean AIX environment, all extension modules failed to build. When I recompiled (with keeping all artifacts from previous build) some of them successfully got compiled. When I try to compile again, most of them successfully compiled. I'm sorry but I don't know why this happens or how to solve it. We can always revert that change but I guess that isn't the real problem.