python - Use `__dict__` or `vars()`?

Question

Builtin function vars() looks more Pythonic to me, but I see __dict__ used more frequently.

The Python documentation indicates that they are equivalent.

One blogger claims that __dict__ is faster than vars().

Which shall I use?

Answer 1

Generally, you should consider dunder/magic methods to be the implementation and invoking functions/methods as the API, so it would be preferable to use vars() over __dict__, in the same way that you would do len(a_list) and not a_list.__len__(), or a_dict["key"] rather than a_dict.__getitem__('key')