PyTypeObject structures, I had to make prototypes for the functions, and
move the structure definition ahead of the functions. I'd dearly like a better
way to do this - to change this would make for a massive set of changes to
the codebase.

There's still some warnings - this is purely to get rid of errors first.

available %zd format character. Mark with an XXX comment so we can fix this,
later.

In C++, it's an error to pass a string literal to a char* function
without a const_cast().  Rather than require every C++ extension
module to put a cast around string literals, fix the API to state the
const-ness.

I focused on parts of the API where people usually pass literals:
PyArg_ParseTuple() and friends, Py_BuildValue(), PyMethodDef, the type
slots, etc.  Predictably, there were a large set of functions that
needed to be fixed as a result of these changes.  The most pervasive
change was to make the keyword args list passed to
PyArg_ParseTupleAndKewords() to be a const char *kwlist[].

One cast was required as a result of the changes:  A type object
mallocs the memory for its tp_doc slot and later frees it.
PyTypeObject says that tp_doc is const char *; but if the type was
created by type_new(), we know it is safe to cast to char *.

[ 1346144 ] Segfaults from unaligned loads in floatobject.c

by using memcpy and not just blinding casting char* to double*.

Thanks to Rune Holm for the report.