Python will reclaim/reuse tuples sometimes, but I'm unsure if it will fully "intern" them the way it does for ints (and java does for some strings). Regardless

Python will reclaim/reuse tuples sometimes, but I'm unsure if it will fully "intern" them the way it does for ints (and java does for some strings). Regardless, even if that optimization is present, the overhead of checking and deduping the tuples against the intern cache as they are constructed after the split operations would likely be considerable. Indexes would likely remain the very fastest strategy. An optimization theoretically exists which could make tuple splitting as fast as index accounting (representing split results as slices/views into the original tuple), but I do not believe python does that, as it would cause unexpected memory growth in some situations, unless accompanied by a very specialized garbage collection scheme.