I am submitting a new patch that excludes int() changes.  The honest reason for the exclusion is that I gave up chasing a bug that only shows in full regrtest runs.  (Marc, I don't think it is related to what you thought was a missing norm decref: that place had result = NULL, not return NULL, so the contral was falling through to the decref after the if statement.)  Nevertheless, I think it makes sense to proceed with smaller steps.  As Marc suggested, PyUnicode_EncodeDecimal() API will stay indefinitely, so there is no urge to remove its use.  There are no actual bugs associated with int(), so technically it does not belong to this issue.