Long story short

PEP-557 introduced data classes into Python standard library, that basically can fill the same role as collections.namedtuple and typing.NamedTuple. And now I'm wondering how to separate the use cases in which namedtuple is still a better solution.

Data classes advantages over NamedTuple

Of course, all the credit goes to dataclass if we need:

• mutable objects
• inheritance support
• property decorators, manageable attributes
• generated method definitions out of the box or customizable method definitions

Data classes advantages are briefly explained in the same PEP: Why not just use namedtuple.

Q: In which cases namedtuple is still a better choice?

But how about an opposite question for namedtuples: why not just use dataclass? I guess probably namedtuple is better from the performance standpoint but found no confirmation on that yet.

Example

Let's consider the following situation:

We are going to store pages dimensions in a small container with statically defined fields, type hinting and named access. No further hashing, comparing and so on are needed.

NamedTuple approach:

from typing import NamedTuple

PageDimensions = NamedTuple("PageDimensions", [('width', int), ('height', int)])

DataClass approach:

from dataclasses import dataclass

@dataclass
class PageDimensions:
    width: int
    height: int

Which solution is preferable and why?

P.S. the question isn't a duplicate of that one in any way, because here I'm asking about the cases in which namedtuple is better, not about the difference (I've checked docs and sources before asking)