Indeed, it is in new 1.7 as per the release announcement. Part of the whole logger improvements that came in Erlang/OTP 21.
Oh, and something else about compile time purging: this is probably even more useful for simply weeding out debug messages you don’t want to see. libcluster’s gossip protocol used to have an annoyingly persistent and frequent debug message. It was eventually patched out, but until then I just commented it out manually. Compile-time purging would have really come in handy …
