using PySlice_GetIndicesEx() in debug builds.

using PySlice_GetIndicesEx() in debug builds.

using PySlice_GetIndicesEx() in debug builds.

Patch by Jelle Zijlstra.

Patch by Jelle Zijlstra.

Calling builtin method is at most 10% faster.

* so->used never gets changed during a resize
* so->filled only changes when dummies are present and being eliminated

(10-20% for small integers).

Issue #29300: Rename struct.unpack() second parameter from "inputstr" to
"buffer", and use the Py_buffer type.

Fix also unit tests on struct.unpack() which passed a Unicode string instead of
a bytes string as struct.unpack() second parameter. The purpose of
test_trailing_counter() is to test invalid format strings, not to test the
buffer parameter.

Add an unit test on the _struct.Struct.unpack_from() method to test passing
arguments as keywords.

* The struct module now requires contiguous buffers.
* Convert most functions and methods of the _struct module to Argument Clinic
* Use "Py_buffer" type for the "buffer" argument. Argument Clinic is
  responsible to create and release the Py_buffer object.
* Use "PyStructObject *" type for self to avoid explicit conversions.
* Add an unit test on the _struct.Struct.unpack_from() method to test passing
  arguments as keywords.
* Rephrase docstrings.
* Rename "fmt" argument to "format" in docstrings and the documentation.

As a side effect, functions and methods which used METH_VARARGS calling
convention like struct.pack() now use the METH_FASTCALL calling convention
which avoids the creation of temporary tuple to pass positional arguments and
so is faster. For example, struct.pack("i", 1) becomes 1.56x faster (-36%)::

    $ ./python -m perf timeit \
        -s 'import struct; pack=struct.pack' 'pack("i", 1)' \
        --compare-to=../default-ref/python
    Median +- std dev: 119 ns +- 1 ns -> 76.8 ns +- 0.4 ns: 1.56x faster (-36%)
    Significant (t=295.91)

Patch co-written with Serhiy Storchaka.

_Pickle_FastCall() has a surprising API: it decrements the reference counter of
its second argument.

method when unpickle collections.deque and other list-like objects.
This can speed up unpickling to 2 times.

Based on patch by Vajrasky Kok.

Issue #29367. On Python 2, __init__ name is render as u'__init__'.