Terry J. Reedy wrote:
> In the interest of possibly improving the imminent 3.1 release,
> I opened #6216
> Raise Unicode KEEPALIVE_SIZE_LIMIT from 9 to 32?

Thanks for opening that ticket.

> I wonder if it is possible to make it generically easier to subclass
> PyVarObjects (but my C knowledge to getting too faded to have any ideas).

Even if we were to add some pointer arithmetic tricks to at least
hide away the complexities, you'd no longer be able to change the
way the data memory allocation works.

The reason is simple: subclassing is about reusing existing method
implementations and only adding/changing a few of them.

If you want to change the way the allocation works, you'd have
to replace all of them.

Furthermore, using your subclasses objects with the existing APIs
would no longer be safe, since these would still assume the
original base class memory allocation scheme.

In summary:

Implementations like the unicoderef type I posted
and most of the other use cases I mentioned are no longer
possible, ie. you will *always* have to copy the data in order
to work with the existing Unicode APIs on it.

The current implementation has no problem with working on referenced
data, since support for this was built in right from the start.

That's what I meant with closing the door on future enhancements
that would make a huge difference if used right, for a mere
10% performance increase.