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> The big win is in simplification of the code.

What do you call "big simplification"? Several malloc/free 
calls and appropriate NULL checks?

Aside from stack usage issues the big loss here is 
portability - we either need to use some fixed length 
buffer with the size sufficient to hold any type of address 
(ugly!) or use sockaddr_storage, which may not exist on all 
platforms supported by the python.

-Maxim