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Is there any performance advantage to using lists over dictionaries over tuples in Python?
If I’m optimising for speed, is there any reason to prefer one over another?
Rich,
Lists and dicts are beasts suitable for different needs. Make sure you don’t use lists for linear searches where dicts hashes are perfect, because it’s way slower. Also, if you just need a list of elements to traverse, don’t use dicts because it will take much more space than lists.
That may sound obvious, but picking the correct data structures algorithmically has much higher performance gains that micro-optimization due to more efficient compiled code layouts, etc. If you search in a list in O(n) instead of in a dict in O(1), micro-optimizations won’t save you.