This would be one of the approaches to use if you wanted to squeeze the last pieces of performance out of this class. I would recommend using Cython for this though.

The problem with both of these approaches is that, well, use this too often, however, and you suddenly realise you are not really coding in Python anymore.

Also, correct me if I'm wrong, overuse of tricks like these is one of the key reasons why we cannot have nice things like PyPy for all modules.