METH_NOARGS functions need only a single argument but they are cast
into a PyCFunction, which takes two arguments. This triggers an
invalid function cast warning in gcc8 due to the argument mismatch.
Fix this by adding a dummy unused argument.
The CPython runtime assumes that there is a one-to-one relationship (for a given interpreter) between PyThreadState and OS threads. Sending and receiving on a channel in the same interpreter was causing crashes because of this (specifically due to a check in PyThreadState_Swap()). The solution is to not switch threads if the interpreter is the same.
