Vladimir Marangozov's long-awaited malloc restructuring.
For more comments, read the patches@python.org archives.
For documentation read the comments in mymalloc.h and objimpl.h.

(This is not exactly what Vladimir posted to the patches list; I've
made a few changes, and Vladimir sent me a fix in private email for a
problem that only occurs in debug mode.  I'm also holding back on his
change to main.c, which seems unnecessary to me.)
diff --git a/Modules/arraymodule.c b/Modules/arraymodule.c
index dcd931b..9a09c7d 100644
--- a/Modules/arraymodule.c
+++ b/Modules/arraymodule.c
@@ -346,7 +346,7 @@
 	if (nbytes / descr->itemsize != (size_t)size) {
 		return PyErr_NoMemory();
 	}
-	op = PyMem_NEW(arrayobject, 1);
+	op = PyObject_NewVar(arrayobject, &Arraytype, size);
 	if (op == NULL) {
 		return PyErr_NoMemory();
 	}
@@ -356,14 +356,11 @@
 	else {
 		op->ob_item = PyMem_NEW(char, nbytes);
 		if (op->ob_item == NULL) {
-			PyMem_DEL(op);
+			PyObject_Del(op);
 			return PyErr_NoMemory();
 		}
 	}
-	op->ob_type = &Arraytype;
-	op->ob_size = size;
 	op->ob_descr = descr;
-	_Py_NewReference((PyObject *)op);
 	return (PyObject *) op;
 }
 
@@ -466,7 +463,7 @@
 {
 	if (op->ob_item != NULL)
 		PyMem_DEL(op->ob_item);
-	PyMem_DEL(op);
+	PyObject_Del(op);
 }
 
 static int