The new dict implementation was introduced in 3.5 (with forced order randomization, which was removed in 3.6) because it is faster and uses less memory than the

The new dict implementation was introduced in 3.5 (with forced order randomization, which was removed in 3.6) because it is faster and uses less memory than the previous non-ordered dict. Ordering is merely a nice byproduct. So you're not paying any penalty. OrderedDict is fundamentally different because it is designed to allow inserting/removing keys in the middle of the ordering in O(1) time. It does not use the new dict under the hood, or vice-versa.