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by andreasvc 4507 days ago
Memory efficiency? The last time I checked namedtuple dynamically generates code for a class with the specified fields, and evals the code. So it would be exactly as efficient as a normal class. For memory efficiency you want to have multiple points in a single array, to avoid the overhead of objects, but you'd need Numpy or Cython for that.
1 comments

Not quite. The namedtuple will not have a per-instance attribute dictionary, so there is a significant memery saving when creating loads of them.
Right. But you can fit 2 floats in 8 bytes so if it's memory saving and efficiency you're after, you would use an array to avoid object creation overhead. Namedtuples are nice for their self-documenting properties though, but it's misleading to advertise them as an optimization.