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Thank you very much for a detailed explaination.

In my opinion, this issue deserves more attention and consideration. There's a trend to create not just simple  fire-off/throw-away scripts, but complex, long-running, GUI software in Python(as well as in other scripting/VM  languages), and this tradeoff could make memory usage unnecessary high in not-so-rare usage patterns. That  way, a split-second gain caused by having immortal integers could easily be eaten by VM trashing due to  overconsumption of memory. I believe that comparable integer/float performance can be attained even without having these types as infinitely-immortal.