[Python-ideas] namedtuple with ordereddict

[Steven D'Aprano]

On Tue, Jul 18, 2017 at 06:16:26PM -0400, Jim J. Jewett wrote:
> Given that
> 
> (1) dicts now always pay the price for ordering
> (2) namedtuple is being accelerated
> 
> is there any reason not to simply define it as a view on a dict, or at
> least as a limited proxy to one?

Tuples are much more memory efficient than dicts, they support lookup by 
index, and you'll break a whole lot of code that treats namedtuples as 
tuples and performs tuple operations on them. For instance, tuple 
concatenation.


> Then constructing a specific instance from the arguments used to
> create it could be as simple as keeping a reference to the temporary
> created to pass those arguments...

The bottleneck isn't creating the instances themselves, the expensive 
part is calling namedtuple() to generate the named tuple CLASS itself. 
Creating the instances themselves should be fast, they're just tuples.


-- 
Steve