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/selectmodule.c b/Modules/selectmodule.c
index b48eb54..fb46fc3 100644
--- a/Modules/selectmodule.c
+++ b/Modules/selectmodule.c
@@ -278,9 +278,9 @@
 	wfd2obj = PyMem_NEW(pylist, FD_SETSIZE + 3);
 	efd2obj = PyMem_NEW(pylist, FD_SETSIZE + 3);
 	if (rfd2obj == NULL || wfd2obj == NULL || efd2obj == NULL) {
-		PyMem_XDEL(rfd2obj);
-		PyMem_XDEL(wfd2obj);
-		PyMem_XDEL(efd2obj);
+		if (rfd2obj) PyMem_DEL(rfd2obj);
+		if (wfd2obj) PyMem_DEL(wfd2obj);
+		if (efd2obj) PyMem_DEL(efd2obj);
 		return NULL;
 	}
 #endif