For METH_NOARGS, you can get rid of the separate _impl function.  This makes the generated code much smaller.

Seconded.

But only if there are no self or result converters.

(Actually a self converter would be fine too.  Those are only allowed to cast.)

I'm not doing this; here's why.  I want the call signature to the impl function to be the *idealized* signature of that function.  And METH_NOARGS passes in a dumb stupid second argument that is always a NULL pointer.  I just don't want that there.

The long-term goal of Clinic is to let us speed up argument parsing.  We'll do this by rewriting the whole approach to argument parsing.  I suspect this will include not just PyArg_ParseTuple but even the whole callback mechanism, METH_O METH_NOARGS and all that.  So I can live with the extra three-line function for now.

Also, I assert that compilers are sufficiently smart today to fold the impl function back into the parsing function.  Therefore this approach has no run-time cost.

Finally, if you're trying to reduce the number of lines of generated code stomping on your poor tired eyes, consider playing with the Clinic buffer prototype:

    https://bitbucket.org/larry/python-clinic-buffer

You can at least prototype with it before checking in for now.

Sure, I wasn't concerned with compilation, only saving lines of code. But I agree that the buffer way sounds much more promising.

Just seemed odd that METH_O was clean and METH_NOARGS less so :)