[Python-Dev] Python 3.6 dict becomes compact and gets a private version; and keywords become ordered (original) (raw)

Antoine Pitrou solipsis at pitrou.net
Mon Sep 12 07:50:38 EDT 2016

On Fri, 9 Sep 2016 14:01:08 -0500 David Mertz <mertz at gnosis.cx> wrote:

It seems unlikely, but not inconceivable, that someday in the future someone will implement a dictionary that is faster than current versions but at the cost of losing inherent ordering.

I agree with this. Since ordering is a constraint, in abstracto it is quite understandable that relaxing a constraint may enable more efficient algorithms or implementations.

Besides, I don't think it has been proven that the compact-and-ordered dict implementation is actually faster than the legacy one. It is more compact, which can matter in some contexts (memory-heavy workloads with lots of objects, perhaps), but not necessarily others.

Regards

Antoine.

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