[M.-A. Lemburg]
... Hmm, this makes me wonder: perhaps we should start thinking about phasing out varying length PyObjects in the interpreter...
No chance, IMO: the memory savings is too great.
esp. the inability to subclass strings looks like a bummer for future extensions of this particular type. Unicode doesn't have this problem, BTW.
OTOH, I know someone at Zope Corp who could testify with force about the memory burden of switching to Unicode strings -- if you've got gobs of 'em, it's much worse than a factor of 2 blowup. Moving to obmalloc.c should help that a lot (two malloc overheads per Unicode string, and obmalloc overheads are much lower).
Or we need to come up with a fairly nice way of making subclassing varying length types a lot easier, e.g. by adding a special pointer ob_ext to PyObject_VAR_HEAD which then allows declaring type extensions in an malloced buffer.
Thoughts ?
Not a one <wink>.