[Tronchenbiais]

Regarding the implementation of this, I am surprised by the use of the least significant bits of the local ref count to hold what are essentially flags telling whether the reference is immortal or deferred. This sounds like a ugly hack, and as pointed out by the article, will break existing C code manipulating the count directly without using the associated macros (although arguably, doing this is unspecified, and really it's their fault).

My guess is that this was done for memory efficiency, but is there really no way to have the local refcount be a packed struct or something, where the "count" field holds the real ref count and the flags are stored separately? I have no understanding of the CPython internals, so it may very well be impossible, but I would appreciate someone explaining why.