Thanks... yep I realise method calls are slower than operators, am hoping we can still find a cunning way to speed up this use case nonetheless. :D For example by having a configuration option on dict (or making a new subclass) that gives the (speedy!) [] operator the same no-exception semantics you'd get from calling get(). As you can see from my timeit benchmarks none of the current workarounds are very appealing for this use case, and a 2.2x slowdown for this common operation is a shame.