What is the difference between old style and new style classes in Python?

Question

What is the difference between old style and new style classes in Python? When should I use one or the other?

Answer 1

Old style classes are still marginally faster for attribute lookup. This is not usually important, but it may be useful in performance-sensitive Python 2.x code:

In [3]: class A:
   ...:     def __init__(self):
   ...:         self.a = 'hi there'
   ...:

In [4]: class B(object):
   ...:     def __init__(self):
   ...:         self.a = 'hi there'
   ...:

In [6]: aobj = A()
In [7]: bobj = B()

In [8]: %timeit aobj.a
10000000 loops, best of 3: 78.7 ns per loop

In [10]: %timeit bobj.a
10000000 loops, best of 3: 86.9 ns per loop