[Python-Dev] Subclassing varying length types (What's a PyStructSequence ?)

[Martin v. Loewis]

> BTW, is the memory burden really such a big argument these days ?

You should consider that malloc overhead is often 16 bytes per
object. Given that PyUnicodeObject is 24 bytes in 2.2, system malloc
will allocate 48 bytes per Unicode object on modern architectures.  I
would think 100% overhead *is* a big argument. 

If you relate this to the actual data, it gets worse: A Unicode string
of length 1 would still require 32 bytes on an allocator that aligns
to 16. Therefore, to store 2 bytes of real data, you need 80 bytes of
memory.

I don't know how much overhead pymalloc adds, though; I believe it is
significantly less expensive.

Regards,
Martin