[MAL]
Have you tried disabling all free list and using pymalloc instead ?
No, but I haven't tried anything -- it's a 2.3 issue.
If this pays off, I agree, we should get rid off all of them.
When I do try it <wink>, it will be slower but more memory-efficient (both data and code) than the type-specific free lists, and faster and much more memory-efficient than using malloc().
... I would consider moving from 8-bit strings to Unicode an improvement in flexibility.
Sure. Moving from one malloc to two is orthogonal.
It also results in better algroithms (== simpler, less error-prone, etc. in this case).
Unclear what "it" means; assuming it means using two mallocs instead of one for a Unicode string object, the 8-bit string algorithms haven't been a particular source of bugs. People mutating strings at the C level has been.
As I said, it's a tradeoff flexibility vs. memory consumption. Whether it pays off depends on your application environment. It certainly does for companies like Micron and pays off stock-wise for a lot of people... uhm, getting off-topic here :-)
I've got nothing against Unicode (apart from the larger issue that the whole world would obviously be a lot better off if they switched to American English <wink>).
Subclassing seems easy enough to me from the Python level; I don't have time to revisit C-level subclasssing here (and I don't know that it's hackish there either, but do think it's in need of docs).
It is beautifully easy for non-varying-length types. Unfortunately, it happens that some of the basic types which would be attractive for subclassing are varying length types (such as string and tuples).
It's easy to subclass from str and tuple in Python -- even to add your own instance data.
In my case, I'm looking for away to subclass strings, but I haven't yet found an elegant solution to the problem of adding extra data to the instances.
It's easy if you're willing to use a dict: class STR(str): def __new__(cls, strguts, n): self = str.__new__(cls, strguts) self.n = n return self s = STR('abc', 42) print s # abc print s.n # 42 __slots__ doesn't work here, though. I admit I personally don't see much attraction to subclassing from str and tuple, apart from adding additional *methods*. I suppose someone could code up two-malloc variants ...