My tests don't show the promised speed up of 10%. The code is as fast as the old code for simple cases and slightly faster for complex cases with several of args and kwargs. But the patch simplifies the code, too.
* unified the way intobject, longobject and mystrtoul handle
values around -sys.maxint-1.
* in general, trying to entierely avoid overflows in any computation
involving signed ints or longs is extremely involved. Fixed a few
simple cases where a compiler might be too clever (but that's all
guesswork).
* more overflow checks against bad data in marshal.c.
* 2.5 specific: fixed a number of places that were still confusing int
and Py_ssize_t. Some of them could potentially have caused
"real-world" breakage.
* list.pop(x): fixing overflow issues on x was messy. I just reverted
to PyArg_ParseTuple("n"), which does the right thing. (An obscure
test was trying to give a Decimal to list.pop()... doesn't make
sense any more IMHO)
* trying to write a few tests...
passing a string. Martin already fixed the actual crash by ensuring
Py_UNICODE is unsigned. As discussed on python-dev, this fix
removes the possibility of creating a unicode string from a raw buffer.
There is an outstanding question of how to fix the crash in 2.4.
