This is meant as a comment to Sven Marnach but the system won't let me comment.

Why would you use pop when if is faster in both cases, key present or not? Please change your answer to use if instead of pop. And you could also improve your answer by mentioning that if you look at the error bars on real world tests in Python 3, the try method isn't faster than the if method even if the key exists. My hypothesis is that that setting up the exception handler soaks up the time gained by simply using del. I haven't tested this hypothesis, but if true, the del method should be expected to be slightly faster if you can be absolutely sure that the key exists or if you already have a try frame set up for other purposes that can adequately deal with with a missing key problem as well and missing keys are rare enough.