I do not understand it either. The concept (pointer to C string with a length) is obvious and has been done many times. Object allocation saves memory and will

I do not understand it either. The concept (pointer to C string with a length) is obvious and has been done many times. Object allocation saves memory and will be a bit faster compared to larger PyObjects. You can still use the CPython arena allocator that is faster than malloc() for small objects. This is also standard practice. Other than that, why is this "for the next generation of scientific computing"? The announcements that come out of NumPy continue to amaze me.